Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak by Selma Leydesdorff (review)

Selma Leydesdorff’s Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak focuses on the complex familial fragmentations that numerous Srebrenica survivors continue to bear or struggle to accept two decades after the genocide. At the heart of this study, rest, above all, the voices of women survivors and their relentless efforts to prevent the life narratives of their family members—mostly men and boys—from slipping into the collective oblivion at home and abroad.

Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak is divided into seven chapters. These are preceded by a brief story about one of the surviving Srebrenica women (Sabaheta Fejić), which is entitled simply “Sabaheta’s Story.” The function of this particular story remains open to multifaceted symbolic implications at the outset of the book. Yet the last page of Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak reveals the more precise meaning of “Sabaheta’s Story.” The latter operates as a mnemonically complex prelude to the rest of interviews, remembrances, and testimonials that constantly oscillate among these women’s violently crushed pasts, uncertain presents, and nebulous futures. The connective tissue of the ensuing chapters is the unfolding of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), but also its quicksand-like destruction that had swallowed the country’s normalcy in general. In particular, this destruction turned a small town in East Bosnia, Srebrenica, into the site of a systematically organized campaign for indiscriminate killings of Bosnian Muslims. Leydesdorff, therefore, constantly reminds her readers of the brutal consequences that still remain plentiful, real, and unresolved. In reading these chapters, the reader is reminded of such consequences through several examples, among others, the approximately 9,000 indiscriminately killed Muslim boys and men; raped and displaced women survivors from and around Srebrenica; survivors’ unfinished geographical returns; refugee camp experiences; and the excruciating searches and identifications of the victims’ bodies in mass graves. Leydesdorff cuts into these consequences by privileging the voices of the women survivors without failing to evoke subtle references to the theories on collective and individual memory, cultural trauma, and post-conflict transitional complexities.

The notion of familial fragmentation in the book unfolds into a multidirectional loss at a community, village, or town level. This kind of loss, as introduced in Chapter Two and carried out throughout the rest of the study, is situated in the pre-war era (Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia), the war-ravaged era of the 1990s, and post-conflict periods of survivors’ hope, anguish, or disappointments. The author captures the sense of bi-ethnic cohabitation in Srebrenica (as well as in nearby villages), for instance, by recalling subjective experiences of friendship. Leydesdorff underscores this by recalling an interview about a Muslim woman’s prewar “friendship with a Serb woman; they had been best friends since childhood. . . . She and her friend used to attend church or go to the mosque together.”¹ These bi-ethnic cohabitations, which were embedded mostly in the mutual respect most villagers practiced toward their counterparts’ religious, ethnic or cultural celebrations, rituals, and promises, are juxtaposed with destruction-oriented behaviors during the war years in the 1990s. For example, in Chapter Three, Leydesdorff underscores how such pre-war friendship and relationships left numerous survivors in utter disbelief, for the same friendships turned into platforms for hatred, intolerance, killings, and genocide. By citing a trial witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Leydesdorff explains that a “young Muslim woman testifying at the Yugoslav Tribunal said that all the murderers were known to her; all the witnesses testified that they knew the aggressors.”² These testimonials function as compelling examples of the abrupt and systematic ruptures of communal ties that existed prior to the war. Some communal ties were kept secretly intact, even during the war. The Serb members (military policemen) occasionally opted for latently protecting their former neighbors. In Chapter Three, Edina’s story...