Conflicted walls, mixed messages: untangling transitional justice and traumatic memories at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial in Bosnia

Why is it that, twenty-three years after the Srebrenica genocide, transitional justice and memorialization promises to “heal” and provide “closure” remain largely unrealized—despite assertions by practitioners, scholars, and diplomats to the contrary? The notion that justice is synonymous with healing and closure is just one of the underlying foundations of the transitional justice paradigm expressed at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial (Memorial) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia). International and local actors have different conceptions and expectations of memorialization initiatives focused on broad outcomes and grassroots processes. There is a gap between where transitional justice’s conceptions of memorials as symbolic reparations end and where memory battles begin. The conversation tends to jump straight from enacting justice into discussions about truth-telling, non-repetition, reconciliation, and repair. How these sites’ stakeholders negotiate politics and emotions directly impacts what the memorials communicate. This is especially true when they are governed by survivors living in post-conflict societies where justice remains fleeting, painful memories abound, and international interest has shifted elsewhere. Less attention is also paid to the intricate ways that stakeholders remember, erase, abandon, and manipulate memories. This dichotomy typifies studies about the Memorial. With a handful of exceptions, most fall within two camps. The first emphasize the role of survivors in lobbying for the site’s location that are connected to post-war refugee return and rebuilding the community. The second focus on how the annual commemoration magnifies ethnic hostilities. I argue that segregating discussions about transitional justice’s efficacy and the ongoing memory wars direct attention away from the problematic mnemonic practices they foster at the Memorial. Questions about the genocide as well as how victimhood, perpetration, complicity, nationalism, religion, and gender are reflected speak to the complicated production and representation of memories that the paradigm tends to eschew. Isolating conflicts about how fraught justice and traumatic memories play out across the memorial’s walls and property reveal why it remains a site of both reparation and contestation decades later.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Laura Beth Cohe