Читать книгу Post-War Identification - Torsten Kolind - Страница 42

I will now turn to the other side of the dilemma in which my informants are caught: wanting to remember and put their terrible experiences into words. Remembering is blocked by the fact that people often cannot understand what has happened. It does not make sense to them. As I was told several times, “how should you be able to understand it, when we can’t?” Many people explained that their memories were all like a dream: one is just waiting to open one’s eyes and wake up. Some of the examples offered above already express this feeling of incomprehensibility. I shall here limit myself to two examples. During an interview, in which Fahrudin had been talking about problems related to rebuilding the ruined houses in Stolac, he suddenly said:

There is one thing I don’t understand. I was born here and I lived here until I was caught and put in prison camp, and then I returned and continued to live here, and I intend to die here. But I cannot understand what was going on in their heads. The people who expelled the Bosniaks from here. Those who committed this urbicide [I come back to this term], genocide. You should talk to them instead if you are interested in this social pathology.

When I asked Amela, a young schoolteacher, what she thought about the situation, she turned my question back on me:

What do you as an anthropologist think about this situation? We live together in an area, Serbs, Croats and Muslims. We were raised in the same system and in the same social environment. Why do they have this will to kill? How can they have the will to kill a human being?