On Partisans and Monuments
By Dino Mustafić
Almost every city in the Balkans has a memorial site that unites citizens of all generations in memory and inspires grace and righteousness for the victims of crime and terror.
On the slopes of Mt. Trebević, south of Sarajevo, in the area called Vratca on Austro-Hungarian maps, a “blokhaus” was built, a stone fortress that was in the Second World War officially transformed into an execution and dumping ground where the citizens of the city were killed. Since Vraca became synonymous with the resistance and struggle of Sarajevans against fascism, in 1981 this stone fortress was restored and turned into a historical-memorial complex.
The names of 9,091 victims of fascist terror are inscribed on the walls of the fortress atrium. Thanks to the designer Vladimir Dobrović, sculptor Alija Kučukalić, and landscaper Aleksandar Maltarić, this memorial park became one of those places whose artfulness we proudly highlighted because of the harmonious composition of plant species, running water, and stone, which has high aesthetic, decorative, landscape, and ambient values.
Unfortunately, during the period of the last war in the 1990s, the Vraca Memorial Park was one of military positions that formed a ring around the besieged city. The entire complex was devastated; the fortress, individual memorials, park areas, plateau, staircases, and other parts of this monumental complex were damaged. The stone walls of the fortress around the entrance gate were demolished and the names of the dead removed, while the entire exhibition display disappeared.
For years, Vraca, like other monuments to the People’s Liberation Struggle, instead of being a place of memory became a place of oblivion. This was the fate of most monuments that were built at the locations of important historical battles from the Second World War or at the places of great suffering of civilians and Partisans at the hands of the occupying forces and quislings. Among the most threatened monuments are those in the capital Sarajevo. Many busts of People’s Heroes have disappeared; the bust of Skender Kulenović […] was damaged in 2018. Moreover, there is also the issue of the general impression of the building where the memorial plaque had been placed.
The monument at the place where Vladimir Perić Valter died disappeared, as did the bronze plaque. Streets named after People’s Heroes, especially those named after women in the Yugoslav period, were scandalously renamed.
It was all part of the political trend in the city of abandoning the legacy of the socialist period, which ignored the image of the glorious past of winning the freedom for the country’s people. Ideology and history are not the same, but the new political powers have not learned that lesson.
All the newly created Balkan states devastated the signs of the antifascist struggle, which still exist, but they are no longer places of reverence, but witnesses of the strategy of oblivion. Today, they remind us of the defeat of everything they symbolized. Of course, they are occasionally desecrated by right-wing extremists, but few people register this. The appearance of most of these monuments today testifies to the complete triumph of the old ideology that the best among us defeated on the battlefield in the Second World War.
Thus, as a border area between Sarajevo and East Sarajevo, this Vraca Memorial Park was for years forgotten under bushes and garbage and was literally disintegrating before the eyes of the people of Sarajevo. The situation recently improved to some extent when several municipal-level initiatives, supported by the competent city and cantonal authorities, conducted a cleanup of the park and lit the eternal flame after 27 years. Vraca once again became a gathering place for antifascists.
In recent days, the political public has been scandalized by the initiative to “propose to the institutions of the Republika Srpska and the city of Istočno (East) Sarajevo to build a new memorial complex on parts of the Vraca Memorial Park, which territorially belongs to the Republika Srpska, which would, in its content, represent an authentic testimony of the suffering of the Sarajevo Serbs, not only in the period from 1941 to 1945, but also in the last civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” The initiators from the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Serbs in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina “believe that the existing Vraca Memorial Park in no way symbolizes the truth about the mass suffering of the Serbian people at that time in the city on the Miljacka River.”
The Chairman of the Committee, Đorđe Radanović, pointed out in a revisionist statement that there would be three monuments within the newly built memorial complex:
- The first monument “would be dedicated to the murdered Serbs and Jews in Sarajevo during the Second World War, which would bear the names of all the victims as proof that members of those two nations suffered the most,” which is impossible to recognize both in the appearance and in the inscriptions on the walls of the existing memorial complex, which was built according to the rules of socialism.
- The second monument would be dedicated to all Sarajevo Serbs killed during the recent war events in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- The third monument would be to the names of Sarajevo streets from which the post-war Sarajevo authorities expelled the Serbian prefix and replaced it with the names of individuals who had committed crimes against the Serbian people or who were known supporters of fascism.
This is just a continuation of the deliberate strategy of the Republika Srpska authorities who want to redefine the rarely preserved monuments of the “previous regime and their victims” into a new narrative. Republika Srpska president, Milorad Dodik, works on this with an entire spectrum of non-governmental organizations that he instrumentalizes to constantly create new memory, invent traditions, and build the nationalist attitude amond young people towards the memory and legacy of the Second World War.
Memory is monopolized by denying facts; monuments are misused. This reflects the attitude towards the processes of dealing with the past through the culture of lies and denial. That is why the reinterpretation of memory is best used in the treatment of antifascist monuments, with the practice of erecting completely new monuments with different and revised content about the Second World War in which Chetniks and quislings are the liberating armies.
The initiative from the Republika Srpska goes one step further, continuing the political-historical tendency of building monuments that intertwine narratives from the 1990s war, the Second World War, and often also events from the distant past that speak of a glorious, warrior, national history and a libertarian tradition.
Of course, the other two sides, i.e. Bosniak and Croats, do not remain without responsibility in this matter, as they name streets and elementary schools after controversial figures, most often proven quislings and often executioners.
I want to believe that the memory of the most honorable young men and women of Sarajevo as fighters of the most glorious period of the struggle for freedom of all the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina will remain untainted by the politics of historical revisionism. Adding a monument to the dead from the last war to this complex is an attack on the fundamental values for which this monument was built in the first place. It would be an anti-civilizational act that seeks to unite the impossible. In this manner, a policy that denies the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina would validate those who started the war with the aim of destroying the state in the first place.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country of paradoxes that has long since betrayed the values of the fallen Partisans. It is, therefore, possible that the graves of the creators and restorers of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s statehood would sit next to those who are its destroyers and deniers. We owe the Partisans our eternal gratitude and respect for their ethical choice of renouncing their individual selves for the benefit of others. It was a sublime defense of the substance of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The antifascists knew that freedom is another name for love of humanity and life. Seventy-six years later, their descendants live in the present filled with failures, personal and collective defeats, frustrations and humiliations, so we have an imperative to defend the reasons from our past why we should continue to believe in hope and better parts of us.
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The essay was first published in the Bosnian original, “O partizanima i spomenicima,” on 18 January 2021 at Peščanik.net. It is reprinted here in an abridged translation with permission on the 43rd anniversary of the opening of the Vraca Memorial Park, coinciding with the Statehood Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
About Dino Mustafić
Dino Mustafić is a Bosnian film and theater director and current managing director of the Sarajevo National Theater.