Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

Theme 2: Representation

Theme 2 REPRESENTATION On one of my visits to the Rome offices of the Guardian, the En­ glish foreign correspondent Ed Vuillamy lent me two maps of Bosnia­Herzegovina. One was a road map; it reminded me of maps of California. I could estimate by comparison, for example, that the Karlovac front line was about as far from downtown Zagreb as San Mateo is from San Francisco, or that the notorious concentration and rape/death camp Omarska was about as far from Sarajevo as Los Angeles is from San Diego. The other map was different. It was an "ethnic" map, one that showed where Serbs or Croats or Muslims make up the majority of the local population. It also gave the percentage of the popu­ lation composed of groups who are not the local majority. Pie graphs were superimposed over the territorial representation so that the whole map bulged with circles of various sizes leaping out at me. Given the extent of the genocide since the map was printed in 1992, I'm sure the pie graphs would look different today. What struck me at the time, however, wasn't the fact that such a map existed. I have often studied maps of this sort; I would be sur­ prised if there were any regions that had not been mapped this 29 30 THEME 2 way. No, what surprised me was the function of this map. This was no sociological survey for the purpose of study; this, for someone who might be headed into Bosnia­Herzegovina, was even more important than the road map; its purpose was to save my skin. Even a neutral observer, as a journalist might well try to be, has a difficult time negotiating the irregular and ever­changing front lines and the numerous checkpoints set up by all the armies and militias that are parties to the conflict. Added to this is the fact that you can't easily pass from a majority Serb population in Bos­ nia­Herzegovina to a majority Croat one, or Serb to Muslim, or Croat to Muslim, because of the suspicion your itinerary would arouse. Having a reliable representation of "ethnic" enclaves, where these exist, is literally a matter of life and death. This is perhaps a banal example of the terrible importance of all representational practice. I am engaged in a representational practice in this writing. I am faced, therefore, with choices of the utmost importance, for the realities I shall represent are of a highly problematic nature: they are atrocities that obliterate even the most vestigial bonds of any social contract. My challenge in representing them is to do so without repeating in any way the harm those atrocities have already perpetrated; nor must I adopt misleading forms or reproduce the dynamics of permission and prohibition, of power and subjugation those atrocities are soaked with. I will not, I have decided, tell the stories.' Stories are linear narratives with tremendous social power. Sto­ rytelling evokes a community of listeners and identifies them as a community. Storytelling legitimizes its listeners as a community. Stories reassure by their own formal limitations. No story goes on forever; each finds its narrative resolution. Stories, no matter how R E P R E S E N T A T I O N 31 unusual, all resemble each other formally. They follow one after another in a series that promises implicitly never to end. As linear narratives, stories contain three elements, the noting of which may at first seem quite trivial: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But such formal characteristics, when ana­ lyzed for their logical, or in fact ideological, implications, are far from innocent. Any beginning, for example, implies that the in­ formation it relays, the reality it represents, is significantly related to what follows and that any other information or reality is insig­ nificant and may just as well be left out. The middle, precisely because of its centrality, announces itself as the most important part, the historically significant event. Its position relative to the beginning implies that everything narrated from the beginning to the middle is somehow causal, in fact sufficiently causal, and leads inevitably to the event narrated at the middle. In similar fashion, the story's end appears as the inevitable and unique result of all that has come before. Linear narrative form, therefore, is far from innocent in its implications of cause...