Srebrenica Through Past Centuries Srebrenica Through Past Centuries
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MONUMENTA SREBRENICA Research, documents, testimonials BOOK 7 SREBRENICA THROUGH PAST CENTURIES SREBRENICA THROUGH PAST CENTURIES Consulting editors: Jusuf Žiga, Ph.D., Professor Sead Selimović, Ph.D., Professor Anita Petrović, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Editor: Adib Đozić, Ph.D., Professor Reader: Zarfa Sarajlić, Professor Translated into English by: Selma Kešetović, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Publisher: Public Institution for Protection and Usage of Cultural-historical and Natural Heritage of the Tuzla Canton Print: OFF-SET Tuzla Edition: 500 Tuzla – Srebrenica 2018. ISSN 2233-162X CONTENT Author’s Preface ............................................................................................. 5 GENOCIDE Enver Halilović THE ISSUE OF COLLECTIVE POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR A MASS WAR CRIME OF GENOCIDE ................................................... 17 Sead Omerbegović, Midhat Čaušević, Medina Salihović MASS GRAVES IN THE ZVORNIK MUNICIPALITY AS MATERIAL EVIDENCE OF THE 1992-95 GENOCIDE AGAINST BOSNIAKS .... 27 Sead Omerbegović, Midhat Čaušević, Fatija Hasanović THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE ABOVE BOSNIANS IN THE MUNICIPALITY OF ZVORNIK-CASE OF BIJELI POTOK ................... 65 FROM BOSNIAN PODRINJE HISTORY Kemal Nurkić THE 1850/51 CENSUS OF THE QUART CRVENA RIJEKA IN SREBRENICA .......................................................................................... 103 Šefko Sulejmanović THE MOSQUE IN KOZLUK NEAR ZVORNIK .................................... 113 Adib Đozić, Rusmir Djedović THE QUART PETRIČ IN SREBRENICA IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY ................................................................................................ 145 Rusmir Djedović, Adib Đozić THE QUARTS FOJHAR, GOSTILJ AND LIKARI NEAR SREBRENICA IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY ................................ 171 APPENDICES Václav Radimsky THE ROMAN CITY OF DOMAVIA IN GRADINA NEAR SREBRENICA IN BOSNIA AND THE EXCAVATIONS THERE .... 213 A Word from the Editor In the last issue of “Monumenta“ we asked the question of the phenomenon of culture of remembering in Bosnikas. More specifically, we discussed the influence of “prejudical historiography“ on the development of culture of remembering in the direction of oblivion or memory. What to remember and why to remember. Everything both good and bad should be memorized. Memorizing is a part of our identity. Everything that we forgot we forgot par of ourselves. Human life on both individual and collective level occurs between remebering and hoping. Remembering is the only human reality. Identity is what happened to us. Proponents of not remembering, forgetting, not dealing with the past, are unable to build assumptions for a more humane future. From the lessons and experiences of the past, it is only possible to design the future. Explaining the impact of the past on the formation of people as a social group, French thinker Ernest Renan says that the nation as a global social group: “is the result of a long past effort, sacrifice and loyalty. The ancestor’s cult is most elegant; our ancestors taught us what we are. The heroic past of great people, glory (I mean, the true one) is the social capital on which the national idea is based. To have a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; done great things together, want to do more of them, those are essential conditions to be a people.“1 A phrase, not to deal with the past but to turn to the future, is impossible. The only social reality is the past, there is no other. The past is our identity, everything we have to show and everything we have to remember on both a collective and an individual level is the result of the past. True, one should not be trapped in the past but it cannot be denied. How to turn to the future if we do not remove the negative assumptions from the past that could be repeated in the future. Not only Bosniaks must not forget the genocidal suffering in the last two centuries, but at the same time it is necessary to affirm their overall socio-historical culture, not reduced to the cultural norms of the culture of left Messianism. We will not exaggerate if we say that the ideologies of “prejudical historiography” of Serbian and Croatian nationalism and the ideology of left-wing Messianism in the Bosniaks themselves have brought Bosniaks, as a nation, with a very rich culture and tradition and a very recognizable 1 E. Renan, Šta je nacija, Kulturni radnik, No. 6/1981, Prosvjetni sabor Hrvatske, Zagreb, pp.104. 5 national identity, on the border of collective forgetting. From the perspective of the ideology of left-wing Messianism, the collective felling of Bosniaks hardly goes beyond the First Session of the ZAVNOBiH. The ideologies of Serbian and Croatian Messianism have muffled the collective identity of Bosniaks with Serbian and Croatian, and it as independent for them does not exist. Both of these ideologies, the ideology of national Messianism and the ideology of leftist Messianism have conditioned not only that Bosniaks do not recognize their identity in culture, language, politics, economy, religion, tradition... but also build a separate social-psychological phenomenon of self- ashamed contempt, similar to the phenomenon of a complex of lower values. The Bosniak phenomenon of self-ashamed, as a specific form of collective consciousness, is manifested in all spheres of life. But before this phenomenon is specifically shown on examples from real life, let us say that the sense of self-ashamed as a collective psychic characteristic causes a decrease in self- esteem. The reduction of self-esteem has resulted in the fact that people value others’ cultural values more than their own. The history of Bosnia and Bosnians/Bosniaks lasts for centuries and no one has the right to reduce it to the 19th and 20th centuries when identity contents were predominantly determined by the aforementioned ideologies beyond the will and aspirations of Bosniaks. Our ancestors in the Middle Ages and during the Ottoman period invested much in their national, cultural, linguistic and religious development than we know today. Somewhat less than five hundred years of Bosniak collective identity in Islamic-Oriental culture and civilization has been almost erased. The ideology of left Messianism erased it by developing the myth of Bosniaks as the remnant of “stagnant feudalism,” and consequently of all the cultural and civilizational values of that period, which have an inestimable and timeless cultural and civilization value in both material and spiritual culture. Let us just mention the Drina Bridge by Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, the bridge of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Mostar, which is unjustly called the Old Bridge. In the spiritual, immaterial, culture, these are works of invaluable cultural value: ballad Hasanaginica, countless sevdalinkas (lit. love poems), pious songs of ilahi and kasida, the scientific works of Hasan Kafi Pruščak,2 2 Hasan Kafija Pruščak (1544-1616), wrote articles in Philosophy, Logic, Law, Politics and Dogma and discussed the most significant social issue of the time there. Among 17 written scientific articles a specially valuable is Temelji mudrosti o uređenju svijeta (lit. The Basics of the Wisdom of Arranging the World) (1596). The fact that this work of his was translated in French, Turkish, Hungarian and German long before it was translated in Bosnian in 1919 by Safet Bašagić, speaks about the significance and value of it. See more on biography and bibliography of Hasan Kafi Pruščak in: A. Ljubović, F. Nametak, H. Kafija Pruščak, Izabrani spisi, V. Masleša, Sarajevo, 1983. 6 Mehmed Hevaii Uskufi3 and more than 200 other authors4 who wrote in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Should all this be waived, ashamed of or forgotten? Imagine what would be left of today’s culture of West European nations if they renounced their cultures written in Latin, or if they renounced medieval church literacy, sculpture and painting. When Safvet-bey Bašagić spoke about the history of intellectual development of Bosniaks, he claimed that Ottoman period was “the most sacred age.” Bašagić wrote further: “In the centenary struggle with the outer and inner enemy, a tired Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim forgot his famous grandfathers, who in their own time made their names famous in the Islamic world with scholar and poetic works.”5 The ideology of national Messianism, Croatian and Serbian, in the efforts to make everything in Bosnia Serbian and Croatian, applied in the culture, the criminal formula of Ivo Andrić, who when writing about the cultural and scientific work of Bosniaks in Oriental languages, said: “their spirituality - even when it was not insignificant and when it certainly caught the attention - it cannot be the object of our work because they belonged to the sphere of another culture by language and spirit.“6 This mischievous thought is the matrix of the views of both national ideologies, both Croatian and Serbian, and they either do not understand or do not want to understand Bosnian unity of differences, based on various sacred traditions, cultures and civilizations. How would a scientist or writer be characterized today who would characterize works written in Latin, German, French, English, Russian, Turkish or some other language as works that “cannot be the object of our work” ... because they belong to the “sphere of another.“ From the beginning of the national liberation movements, up to now, lasts the perfidious, concealed, ideological crypto-isolation of Bosniak identity, especially of its Oriental-Islamic content. This