October 12, 2006

At the end of my first week in Bosnia and Hercegovina, I traveled to Srebrenica with the director of Bosfam (Beba) and her husband. It takes two hours to drive from Tuzla to the Srebrenica municipality, which is the former home to most of the women at Bosfam. Site of one of the 20th century’s most notorious genocides, the fall of Srebrenica in 1995 claimed the lives of about 8,000 men and boys, including the fathers, husbands, and sons of many of the women who work at Bosfam.

The closer we got to Srebrenica, the more visible were the physical effects of war. Some buildings were nothing more than faint stone outlines. Others withstood their attacks to a greater degree, but are almost more painful to see, filled as they are with the decayed reminders of lives permanently disrupted or ended altogether. The empty houses provided compelling evidence that as the 11th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords nears, property rights remain a crucial issue in Bosnia and Hercegovina’s development, and in the quest by survivors to resume a normal life. When I went to Srebrenica I had expected to be moved by the memorial at Potocari and the stories of the victims buried there. But what struck me most on my visit were people’s stories of how the challenge of recovering property is the locus of their day-to-day struggle to re-establish their lives.

The donor organizations who provide funds for returnees to rebuild their houses attach small plaques to the buildings to indicate who supplied the money. One thing is obvious: some reconstructions are more equal than others. We visited not only the town of Srebrenica itself, but several other villages in the municipality, including Skelani. Skelani is located right next to the Drina — the river that now marks the border between Bosnia and Hercegovina and Serbia. Tensions between Bosniaks and Serbs still exist there, and we visited with a man who has returned to the village and does much to negotiate between the two groups to ensure that the delivery of reconstruction goods and services is done fairly and does not engender hostility. We walked with him in the village and saw the wholly completed, neatly whitewashed houses funded by an aid agency in Germany, as well as far less impressive, sometimes half-finished homes whose materials were provided by other groups.

The monument at Potocari is beautifully laid out, with the names of identified victims carved in marble slabs. The graves are in an adjacent field. But part of the cemetery is very close to several houses belonging to returnees. This proximity presents a real paradox. To the extent that returning home is a crucial part of the healing process for those who choose to do so, this process can be inhibited if being at home means seeing a field of buried victims every time one looks out the window. One woman associated with Bosfam has returned to her home overlooking the cemetery at Potocari, but she cannot bear to sleep next to where her husband is buried and spends her nights with friends and neighbors.

In the village of Srebrenica itself, there is still no central heat 11 years after the war ended. In the apartment complex where I stayed, the children’s playground and basketball court have been converted into a large woodpile, and throughout the two days I was there people worked steadily to cut enough wood to heat with during the winter. On the second morning the running water stopped working, a relatively common occurrence. We also visited the school where Beba was formerly the director. The school is only a shadow of its former self in terms of size and resources. We visited the new school director and sat in his office drinking coffee. When we left, he thanked me for coming to the school, invited me to come again, and said that I should ask for money for the school when I return home to the States.

On our way out of Srebrenica, we stopped to visit a couple who live in a nearby hamlet. It was a beautiful day and we sat in their lovely garden, surrounded by chrysanthemums, dahlias, zinnias, and a grape arbor. Their situation demonstrates another legacy of the war for people in Bosnia and Hercegovina, where pensions are granted based on the number of years the employer paid money into the pension system. During the war some companies could not make these payments, and now people are simply denied a pension for that reason. The couple we visited is fortunate enough to have a house, but they have no income. Another problem is that they do not have health care either. They recently lost 200 km — about $150 — when someone purporting to be a doctor showed up at their home, had references from people they knew, and said he could help the woman with a problem she had with her shoulder. The individual took their money, as well as some from their neighbors, and disappeared. My boss and her husband asked them why they had given such a person their money. Their response: “Sometimes when you don’t have any other options you want to believe that something will work.”