Potočari
The juxtaposition of a week in the mountains surrounding the Bosnian village of Potočari, on the 29th anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide. (CW: references to violence).
We’re sat in a big circle inside the cabin, white walls so fresh I can still smell the paint fumes. The black plastic of the chair bites into the exposed flesh of the backs of my knees; the hem of my Australia-green shorts is just an inch too short to protect them. I’m trying to keep from making eye contact with the others in the circle, holding my face completely blank. I count the mundane items in the room. The number of ceiling tiles, the windowpanes, the air-conditioning vents, how many people are wearing Adidas trainers, how many are wearing flip-flops, the slabs of reinforced concrete holding back the tide.
The psychologist sits two people to my right, and while my positioning means that I am one of the first to answer the question of how I feel as she goes around the circle, she is also unable to see me. I can escape her questioning gaze and therefore escape the urge to speak to fill the vast empty silences between confessions. My stomach turns, I can feel that there’s something to be said but I refuse to let it be by me. I notice hairline fractures in the concrete slabs, branching out like ivy across the centre of the room. I turn my head and catch eyes with the only safe gaze, my roommate, Anja. I can see she’s thinking the same, or at least I think she does. The cracks start to drip with moisture.
The psychologist smooths down the creases of her inexplicably fashionable black dress; I wonder how she could drive the three-hour journey in the grey box of a machine parked outside without even a hair out of place or a sweaty smudge of makeup under her eyes. “Is there anything unresolved that you’d like to address with the rest of the group?” She asks no one in particular, “Anything that you’d like to get off your chest?” Someone raises their hand. The levees break.
-
The oppressive greyness of the former battery factory leaves an inherent chill despite the thirty-plus-degree heat. Nestled at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by mountains on almost all sides, it stands out in its sheer abnormality, a structure of concrete and metal in a world of lush greens, bright blues and picturesque wooden homes further down the road. A long road cuts through the valley like a scabbed wound, stretching past the factory complex and towards another village. There, the buildings are half abandoned with sagging red-blue-white flags and scarred with memories of life replaced with bullet holes.
The factory is perhaps the only encroachment of modernity for at least a couple of miles, bar the vast memorial on the opposite side of the road, built into the slopes of the landscape. Over six thousand five hundred white obelisks uniformly mark the graves of men and boys, all trapped and slaughtered in this valley twenty-nine years ago; the only deviations in the white stone are the names. I run my fingers over the hot surface of the memorial wall, tracing the grooves of the letters, which encompass the small open-air mosque in the memorial’s centre. The repetition of a few last names catches me, so I ask a Bosnian girl in our group whether it is a common one. “Some are common last names, but this one isn’t,” she points at a column of names, their last name repeated over and over like a census, “this is one family.”
We are led into the factory by a memorial liaison with the NGO we are all here with, past a chain link fence and the remains of a UN checkpoint at the entry to its slip road. The industrial complex is vast, although we are to remain primarily in two large, converted warehouses where the conference is taking place. The air is heavy, pregnant with silence, to talk is to feel as though you are desecrating sacred land. A white UN truck sits outside our black box of a seminar room, hollow and empty. In the adjacent museum building, I walk through recreations of the UN Dutchbat barracks, photograph the obscene graffiti carved and sprayed into the whitewashed walls, and my tote bag almost knocks into a blue helmet hanging from a wardrobe door. I catch it before it falls. There’s an uneasiness to the group, half of us meeting for the first time, the other half being interns with the NGO; the usual polite chit-chat feels wrong, the ritual of conversing through jokes and shared experiences suspended upon these hallowed grounds. Our guide recounts the day Republika Srpska paramilitaries, the VRS, attacked the valley, killing his father and uncle as his mother fled in one of the last convoys out of the area. He doesn’t remember the day himself; he had been six months old, bundled in a blanket in the crook of his mother’s arm as they escaped the jaws of death.
Towards the end of his tour, he leads us back outside into the oppression of the midday sun and out of the smoothing cool of the warehouses. He points across the gravel slip-road, to the chain link fence running around the base’s perimeter and the high poles of the open gate. It was here, he motions, where the people ran to when the Serbs attacked, when the UN decided that they were not going to fight back to protect the civilians, it was here where the disarmed men had been denied access to their own weapons to defend themselves against the coming onslaught, where they had been denied evacuation. It was not the mountains, amongst the leaders of the VRS, he says, where the decision to allow genocide was made, but rather this stretch of gravel, where the peacekeepers turned their backs on those they were meant to be protecting.
-
I welcome the arrival of nightfall from my throne on the centre court, upon the umpire chair with my back facing a spine ridge of mountains. The sky is now a soft canvas of blending hues, pinks, oranges, yellows, and blues and the bite of the heat has started to ebb away, replaced by a tepid coolness. The raised red lump of a mosquito bite looks shiny below my knee as I kick off my flip-flops and allow the faint breeze to soothe my sweaty soles. A can of lukewarm Coke is sat to my side on a little metal tray; I raise it to my lips before extending my arm out sharply to my left. “Your serve!” My authoritative tone is lessened by laughter, knowing I know the least about tennis on the court.
Between my seat and the embankment of the camp where our sleeping cabins lie, stand four of my colleagues? Or are they acquaintances? Perhaps friends? They’re dressed in colourful T-shirts, exposing perspiration running between their shoulder blades and from under their armpits, their trousers end above reddened knees. Their shoulders are lax with a long day of note-taking and heavy knowledge, was it today that we learnt of the bureaucracy of DNA collections at massive graves and EU peacebuilding initiatives? Or was that yesterday, and today was the lecture on the factors of genocide by a lecturer from the University of Sarajevo? Or was it Harvard? The hours spent inside the black-walled, echoey room, the lack of aircon thickening the air into a paste, the scratch of black ballpoint pens against lined paper. We had made the treacherous minivan journey back up the mountains to our camp in silence, or perhaps it was just I who had nothing to say, staring out of the window as we wound our way higher out of the valley, battling motion sickness.
Aaron lifts his racket and shoots the small, green ball straight over the net, my head follows its trajectory to Kat’s, who returns it with a timid bat, barely sending it back over, its fuzz scraping the plastic lining of the netting. Aaron darts past his doubles partner, Rachel and dives forward. The ball bounces against the astroturf once, and he throws himself to the ground, knees buckling and arm outstretched, catching the ball as it falls back to earth. It fires off from the top of the racket at an odd angle and flies towards me. I duck and escape the ball’s path as it hits the chain link fence behind me with an impressive clang.
“Shit! Sorry!” Aaron calls, raising his hands in a mock surrender.
I point a single finger at him, “Yellow card!” and ignore Rachel’s protests at my comment being for the ‘wrong game’. I throw him a spare ball from my pocket and watch as the four get back into place on the court. My shoulders relax for the first time today.
-
We’re led out of the conference room by a representative of the memorial and along the length of the former factory, into the evening heat and towards a growing crowd. En route, I retrieve my flimsy headscarf, woven with blue and red swirls, draping it over the crown of my head and around my neck. We walk at a brisk pace and fall into silence as we near another near-abandoned rusting warehouse where two large white and grey vans have been parked outside, adorned with Bosnian flags and floral garlands. Inside the vehicles lie fourteen identical green coffins containing the recently identified skeletal remains of victims of the Srebrenica Genocide, the youngest of the victims having been just seventeen years old at the time of his murder. He would’ve been forty-six this year. A group of men help bring the coffins out of the vans and collectively carry them into the warehouse where white-capped imams will begin to lead a memorial prayer. As the light wooden coffins are passed along a line of mourners and staff, journalists scramble to the front of the crowd, their cameras lifted high above their heads as they try to capture the scene.
Inside the sparse warehouse, the numbered coffins are placed on the concrete ground, and a circle forms around them, sobbing mothers clutching their living children, imams reciting prayers, activists watching morosely and camera crews angling their lenses and adjusting their lighting rigs. The prayers are led over a crackling microphone from a small stage in the far corner of the room, as some set down prayer mats and kneel towards Mecca. I stand back at first, keeping my distance lest I get in the way of a mourner, and adjust my headscarf. I stay close to Mira, a girl from Mostar, as her face grows grey. You know we learn these things from when we are children, she tells me, but to see it here in front of me, it’s something completely different.
I think back to the lecture we were given a day or so ago by a representative of the International Commission on Missing Persons, of the photos he showed us of recovered bones, the aerial images of mass graves and VRS cover-up efforts, the stories of the desecration of resting places during the peak of summer to hide bodies across international borders. Which one of those slim green boxes contains Beriz Mujić or Hamed Salić? How have their families spent twenty-nine years not knowing their fates?
My attention is caught by an overly zealous cameraman recording the gut-wrenching cries of an older woman as she is comforted by her daughters. The man next to him extends a microphone towards her, firing questions towards the huddled group as tears stream down her face. I can’t watch and I move away, heading towards the exit of the building, trying not to reflect on the fact that I have the freedom of an outsider to leave as I wish. The choice not to experience the sorrow.
-
The red wine in my glass sloshes as I hike back up the hill towards the cabin site. My toes are starting to cramp as they grip through off-white trainer socks onto the flimsy black plastic of my Ljubljana-bought sliders as I traverse the roughly gravelled track through a sparse settlement of wooden houses. The group I came on this walk with have carried on ahead and I am desperately unprepared for it to have become a hike.
I had been standing by the tennis court chatting with the group when a prehistoric behemoth of a beetle flew into the back of my humidified frizz of hair. I screamed as I felt it crawl further up my head, joined by laughter coming from Charlie and Lena. I put my hand to the back of my head and felt its cold shell and the spikes of its pincers, pleading for anyone to help me extract it until Aaron came to my rescue. “Stay still,” he said as he carefully detangled the creature and threw it towards the court, where it made a dull thud as it hit a wooden railing. I stared at the monster in disbelief, horrified at its sheer size and declared that I needed a drink to cope with the trauma. Upon returning with my glass of red, helpfully provided by my roommate Maria, I was told everyone had been awaiting my return to go on a walk along the mountain trail, and despite my ill-fitting attire, I felt obliged to join.
I knew I should’ve returned to camp when half the group split, but in my chatting, as we walked through the thick pocket of forest, I had lost track of how long we had been walking, narrowly avoiding a giant spider web inhabited by a brown creature perhaps as large as my palm. Then as we reached the end of the thicket and onto more stable ground, the view had distracted any sense of direction and distance. The pink-purple evening sky cast a soft glow over the green-blanketed mountains, the bottom of the valley enshrouded in a pale sliver of mist. We took a turn, and the trail started to sharply descend, knowing the limits of my footwear, I announced I would turn back. “Are you sure you don’t want us to come with you?” Charlie asked. I already felt bad that I had held them up in the beginning and with too much bravado, I replied, “No, it’s fine. It’s not that far.”
I was wrong.
I walk back the way we came, through the small settlement we had passed, although this time the smattering of children playing football between the trees had returned to their homes for the night. The evening glow has been quickly swept away by the encroachment of nightfall, and where I had seen rustic homesteads, I now only see windowless shacks with men smoking and drinking on concrete slab steps. I keep my head down and hurry, blushing profusely from the exertion in the humid air and the fact that I know that I must look like an insane, red-skinned spectre haunting the rurality. My emerald Irish rugby jersey clings to my back and hips, glued to my skin by sweat, whilst my white linen trousers slowly stain with gravel dust and dirt. My sliders announce my arrival to any living being in a twenty-kilometre radius with its incessant, panicked slap against the ground- if my panting hadn’t already done that.
The clearing nears an end and the path returns to the forest, the earth beneath my feet all at once becoming uneven and laden with trip hazards and troughs born of rugged car tyres. I dig into my pockets for my phone and switch on the torch, conscious that I still haven’t got any signal like every other time we have ascended from the valley back up the mountain, as though moving further into the forest was going to help that in any case. I’m on 9% battery and all I can do is hope that it doesn’t give out before I reach camp, as the orange lights from the settlement disappear beyond the wooded frontier and the moonlight struggles to be seen through the dense blanket of branches and leaves. I stumble, spilling some of the wine onto my hand, which I desperately lap up parched, and send my left slider sailing through the air to somewhere a few metres ahead. I stagger, trying to keep my socked foot from stepping in something too unsavoury until I can locate the missing item and return to my previous gait. Previous conversations from breakfast echo in my mind, “Do you think there are bears in this part of Bosnia?” I asked Jasmine, a native of Tuzla, “I’ve heard you get bears here?” She thought for a moment, “Yeah, probably. Wolves wouldn’t surprise me too, we’re pretty far out.”
Fuck, what if a wolf or bear catches my scent or I disturb a pack with my huffing and puffing. I stop and scan the treeline but am unable to see further than a few metres in. I got an orange belt in karate when I was ten, but is that enough to fight off a wild animal? Hopefully, I won’t have to find out. But what if something does attack, or a car comes careening my way? I’ve read articles about how much of this part of the country is still pock-marked with unexploded landmines; on the foreign office travel advice website, it specifically states not to step off marked paths- especially in the countryside- lest you risk being sent sky high. Shit, now I must be afraid of the local wildlife, landmines and the possibility of a rogue people-snatcher finding me adrift and bundling me away. The people in the settlements seemed nice enough, but all it takes is one deviant to whisk me away to their mountain shack and I’m a goner. I pick up the pace, ears straining for any noise that I might not be alone.
With my eyes firmly trained on the torch-lit path, I miss what is directly ahead of me and feel the telltale foreignness of a spiderweb wrapping around my face. In a split second, the image of that ginormous arachnid from earlier pops into my head and I shriek with a flail of limbs, sending my glass of red towards the heavens and drenching myself in its contents. I feel dripping from my hair and down my face, wet patches of Merlot form along the white collar of my jersey and seep into the linen covering my shins, and the glass tumbles somewhere into the undergrowth. Knowing that it’s the only form of weapon I have in the case of hand-to-hand combat, I seek it out with the white light of my dying phone. I find it in a bush at the side of the track and reach in, clasping my fingers around the damp glass and pulling it out. I wipe the lingering feeling of the silky webs from my face and slap the phantom tingling of spider legs at the nape of my neck.
Spluttering and soaked, I continue my odyssey, rubbing my eyes as yellow balls of light flicker in front of me, perhaps I finally have succumbed to hallucinations. The small amount of rational thinking that remains tells me it’s just a firefly, but my heart believes that this is the end. I spot the final break in the trees and make a half-hearted dash to the finish line of safety, almost falling on my face as I step out of the canopy and into the warm yellow lights of the camp, met with a breathtaking sight of the unspoilt night sky and the comforting sound of chatter from the veranda’s smoking area.
The caretaker looks up from his cabin at the sudden noise of my approach, his face morphing into one of sheer confusion as he flicks the ash from his cigarette, avoiding the sleeping German shepherd at his feet. I wipe at the wetness on my face sheepishly, hoping I look slightly less like someone auditioning for a Fenian remake of Stephen King’s Carrie and throw him a brief grimace-like smile before scuttling off to my cabin to clean myself up. I will never be able to get the incriminating and suspicious red stain out of my trousers.
-
My face burns and my calves ache in ways that I have forgotten that they could, all from keeping my position on the steep slope along the far boundary of the cemetery. I adjust my white cotton shirt around my wrists to protect the pale skin as much as possible although I know my efforts will prove to be futile. The incessant sun beats down between the thin foliage over my head, sneaking through the gaps in the spiny, green leaves and radiating heat upon my forehead and scalp. My only protection is my thin and drooping scarf over my hair and shoulders which I pull ever forward towards my eyebrows.
An elderly woman sitting next to me notices my fidgeting and shuffles across her faux-tartan blanket, tapping the empty space and beckoning me to follow her further into the shade. Hvala, I offer with a sheepish smile that is easily batted away with a frail hand. I sit amongst her family, amongst a grieving community, and a feeling of a certain sort of shame churns in my stomach. A sea of thousands of mourners congregating to remember their loved ones, stolen from them and buried in unmarked graves across multiple countries, some never to be found. And myself, an observer on summer break. It feels voyeuristic to witness such a sensitive display, to have been allowed to be a part of this ritual, to share a blanket with someone who has experienced such loss and heartache.
The cemetery steadily fills, the air alive with the recorded recital of Qur’anic verses, melodic Arabic floating across the light breeze. When things seem to have settled, a convoy enters the main gates and a flood of foreign dignitaries, Bosnian ministers and the world press sweep into the open Mosque at the base of the hill, black formal suits starkly visible against the white shirts and dresses of the mourners. The blue and yellow shield crest of the old Bosnian flag drapes the shoulders of many as a choir begins to sing, one woman’s voice leading the group in a haunting rendition of Srebrenički Inferno,
mother mother I still dream of you // sister brother I still dream of you every night…
The crowd mostly congregates around the edges of the cemetery, under the trees’ shadow yet there are a few figures amongst the tombstones. I watch as a woman dressed in pristine white carefully steps over the grass-covered mounds of earth until she drops to her knees and collapses forward, arms wrapped around the bright marble obelisk as her body heaves with sobs. She presses her face against the stone, drawing herself closer to its coldness in a one-sided embrace. The feminine melody continues, almost in a plea,
you are gone, you are gone // I’m looking for you // wherever I go I see you // Mother father why are you gone?...
After the singing ends, the crowd comes down from the hillside to stand together amongst the stones. Some place woven mats in front of them, others forgo the fabric as an Imam leads a series of prayers and the sea of people move as one as they kneel, lean towards the ground and rise again as the words echo against the forest surrounding the scene. In perfect synchronicity.
Those who remain around me follow in their movements and I can hear the faint whispering as they mutter their own prayers, and I watch, choking on the lump in my throat as thousands are united in grief and faith. I have never seen a Muslim prayer in person before, so my thoughts are compounded by the wonder of their collective uniformity of movement, not too dissimilar from the Catholic masses I had attended as a child with my family. There’s a peace to the ritual, despite the pain of the attendees; it feels as though the simmering anger and burning feelings of injustice have subsided for the moment and for the first time that day, the air feels clear. The prayers continue and despite my ignorance of Islamic prayers, I recognise the particularity of the Ṣalāt al-Janāzah, the funeral prayer, as Anja explains to me.
There is a haunting beauty to the scene before me, and its juxtaposition in nature; in its serenity of faith and community, a crowd from across the Balkan peninsula and the world brought together in prayer, and the devastating reality of its reason for being.
-
Kat holds my beer as I fish around the pockets of my shorts for the crumpled carton of cigarettes that have been holding me together this past week. I find them and pull them out triumphantly, passing one to Aaron and lighting up my own. Darkness has fallen, the only lights are that of the main house and veranda and the tennis court spotlights. From our spot on the cement bleachers lining one side of the astroturf football pitch, we have a perfect view of the landscape. “I have an idea,” Aaron says and gets up. Kat and I watch him as he leaves the pitch and disappears around the corner, only to be fully encased in darkness as the floodlights are switched off. The mosquitoes buzzing around the lamps, now confused and disorientated, start to descend towards us, so we bid farewell to our pitch. Cast in the low house lights, Aaron stands with his eyes trained on the clear ocean of dark blue and the bobbing buoys of gas a million lightyears away. As we join him, I take a drag of my mysteriously branded village cigarette and breathe out towards the heavens, briefly clouding my vision in a faint haze. Once it clears, I see the bodies of light in high definition, something I have never witnessed before in my city-dwelling life.
Free of light pollution, the sky is alive. I think I finally understand the use of the word twinkling. As far as the eye can see, celestial bodies radiate light and mystery, evenly spaced out across the throw blanket of space and time. I look for the one I know, my eyes roaming until I find the North Star; I point it out to my companions and begin the exchange of knowledge of the constellations, with Kat’s outstretched finger mapping the Big Dipper, Andromeda…, whilst Aaron catches the blinking of a satellite.
We sit ourselves down on a metal plate on a raised bump of earth, back-to-back in perfect alignment and rest our heads against each other’s, whispering as though not to disturb the landscape before us. It’s our last night in Potočari before we head back early in the morning to Sarajevo, and then finally onto England, Germany, Sweden, the US, Canada…, and a feeling akin to melancholy lingers despite my contentment. I will go home and graduate, celebrate with my friends and family before swanning off back to the continent again; but I know I will never see this sight again for the rest of my life. I will never return to this mountain, I will never sit in this serenity and see this exact angle of the stars and satellites, hear the rustling of this forest, wake up for breakfast with a view of lush forests and the misty valley below. I could never find this place on a map, could never stumble upon it once more. Perhaps I imagined the whole thing, this place, this week, maybe the heavy sense of imposter syndrome I have been wracked with this entire time has actually been a sign that this isn’t real.
“Maybe this is too easy to say,” I whisper, “But I think I can maybe understand why Bosnians fought so hard for this area, why they still fight so hard for it. I mean, look around; this isn’t a place you’d let go of lightly. Where else could compare?”
I’m met with a hum of thought; I don’t think I need anything to be said in response. A shooting star passes overhead, I don’t know what I wish for.
For more information:
The female-led, Sarajevo-based NGO I attended with, the Post-Conflict Research Centre: https://p-crc.org/
The Srebrenica Memorial Centre: https://srebrenicamemorial.org/en
The performance of Srebrenički Inferno by the Djeca Srebrenice Choir, as referenced in my story: (7:32:50-7:37:40)