Srebrenica

Take away Srebrenica’s recent history and it would feel like any other small, slightly isolated, crumbling, old industrial town. Small town people with small town mentalities. I grew up in places of a similar description in the northeast of England. However Srebrenica’s history sits on it like a dead weight. This coupled with its small, run-down normality deeply disturbed me during my time there. A Bosnian colleague from the festival the week before, told me she saw the war in Bosnia as a coming together of all the worst ingredients at the very worst time. For her Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia had always been a very safe environment to live and grow up in, and she was utterly shocked by its collapse and the subsequent violent fallout. She concluded this was not just a Balkan problem, but something that could happen anywhere should the conditions exist. This really made me think, and strangely seemed quite a positive point to consider for a region whose problems are now often written off due to the perceived unique complexities and depth of its national/ethnic divisions. Arriving at Srebrenica however I found it quite frightening to feel the possibilities of what could happen in any old mundane place should all those ingredients mix. The dualities of normality and extremity amplified this and can be found everywhere in the town; the young people in the Rock Bar or the town’s mall, a bus station (above), small vegetable gardens along an idyllic green valley, surrounded by war damaged and empty homes and buildings, an ever expanding cemetery for those massacred and all that memory.

So excuse me, why on earth would you visit such a place?