Abstract
The ever-present need of remembering and reimagining the memory through the culture of building memorial sights, as markers of identity, at the places of extreme violence in the immediate aftermaths of the conflict deescalation was a light motive for writing this paper. By allocating the empirical research on the ground of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is a great opportunity to re-examine the dense perplexity of issues that are enhancing the momentum of the memory juxtaposed with the counter-memory, whereas different interest groups (political or civil) are simultaneously producing competing memories. The case study of BiH allows us to notice and highlight the multidimensionality of memory and counter-memoryalong the way of Bosnian postwar society towards the reconciliation, how it enables the identity building and the nation re-building during the processes of political consolidation and its didactic use for further conflict prevention. Using the discourses, visual materials and interviews from the field research adjusted on the post-conflict memory sites in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Republika Srpska(case study monuments of Gavrilo Principe in Sarajevo vs East Sarajevo), I would like to pinpoint the chasm between the actual purpose of memory sites that are built there after the conflict and the danger of them miscommunicating the conflict inflicted past that could possibly lead to a restoration of that latent conflict. Therefore, my research is concentrated on the coupled counter-memorial sites, which are of enormous importance for the process of reconciliation because of their role of keeping balance to the official narratives and memorials, despite of the fact that this role of them is usually neglected by scholars.
Highlights
“The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it
As a result of those changes, that had deeply influenced a creation of a new Bosnian society encapsulated into new competing memories, monuments and counter-monuments, I am about to research the exact relation among the memory expressed through monuments and counter-monuments and the identity building in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina
Research Question and Presentation of Case Study. To this definitions and the already explained relation of monuments and counter-monuments with the formation of identity in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, my Research Question would be Are the memories returned to the shared public space through the process of building countermemory sites in post-conflict Bosnia enforcing the reconciliation and building of the common identity or undermining the same process giving the advantage to the building of ethnic identities?
Summary
“The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” (Kundera, 1981). Everything that had common denominator had to be “unmixed” and “undone”, while the three competing ethno-religious groups (Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs) inhabiting as majorities the Bosnian space where competing to refill the power vacuum created along the transition and practicing the “ethnic cleansing” of territories (Toal & Dahlman, 2011), in order to accomplish an “ethnic self -cleansing” (Bugarel, 2004). That “cleansed-self” will be a new base for nation building (Bosnian) and nation re-building (Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats) processes on each of their homogenized administrative unites (Anderson, 1983), determinated by Dayton Peace Framework(DPA)
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