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SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — It’s the only genocide to occur in Europe since World War II, but even many Europeans don’t know about it.
In 1995, as the Bosnian War was reaching its end, the Bosnian Serb army slaughtered over 8,000 people as it captured the city of Srebrenica, targeting mostly men, but also women and children.
Now, 26 years later, an Oscar-nominated retelling of three days that led to the mass killing has ignited hopes in Bosnia and Herzegovina for broader recognition of the tragedy that continues to pain the country.
The gut-wrenching film — “Quo Vadis, Aida?” — is told from the perspective of the eponymous Aida, an interpreter who desperately tries to save her husband and two sons as it becomes increasingly apparent that UN peacekeepers on the scene can’t protect the thousands of civilians seeking shelter.
“Srebrenica is an essential part of European history,” the film’s director Jasmila Žbanić said in an interview ahead of the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday. “After all of us were taught about World War II and pledged never to allow those atrocities to be repeated, they happened again.”
Žbanić, who screened the movie for sample audiences outside of Bosnia ahead of its release, said that while people might have heard of the Bosnian War, they rarely grasp the specifics. “Few if none of the people in the audience knew anything about what really happened,” she said.
It’s a blind spot Žbanić feels the European film community shares.
“During a session of the European Film Academy, the president said, ‘Europe has been living in peace for 70 years,’” Žbanić recalled. She felt compelled to remind the audience of the Bosnian War and its casualties: “Either we are not Europe, or we are not people, or we are not worthy of being mentioned. So in the European context, people definitely don’t know enough.”
Still, “Quo Vadis, Aida?” does not feature a single scene of on-screen violence or killing.
“I survived the war in Sarajevo, so I don’t see any beauty or spectacle in war,” Žbanić said. “The public does not need to see bodies in pools of blood to understand what happened.”
Instead, the film focuses on the fear and panic of the Bosniaks, who fell victim to the Bosnian Serb army’s plan to create an ethnically pure territory for Orthodox Christians in eastern Bosnia. The Bosniaks, with their nominal Muslim faith, were targeted as a threat to that goal.
Yet the movie intentionally contains references to both Christianity and Islam.
The film’s title harkens back to the Acts of Peter, one of the apocryphal books from Jesus’s apostles. In the text, Saint Peter returns to Rome to be crucified after a vision of the resurrected Jesus gives him the courage to do so.
And “Aida,” the main character’s name, means “returning visitor” in Arabic. In the film, Aida, like Peter, makes a difficult choice to willingly return to the place of suffering — in her case to a changed Srebrenica, years later.
“I didn’t want to end the movie with the slaughter,” Žbanić said. “Because that wouldn’t depict the full reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Just because peace agreements were signed, that doesn’t mean peace has been achieved, and all those ideas and perpetrators just disappeared.”
Emir Suljagić, director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center and a Srebrenica survivor himself, said complete understanding of what happened is a distant goal, but that an Oscar win on Sunday would give the movie — the first feature film produced in Bosnia on the genocide — a global platform.
“The deeply rooted perceptions of Bosnia and Bosniaks in Europe will not disappear after the success of one movie,” Suljagić said. “However, the genocide in Srebrenica will now reach audiences that don’t deal with the issue daily and perhaps lead to an increased interest in understanding and knowing more.”
Bosniaks are one of a handful of native Muslim communities in Europe. In the Balkans, Muslim communities stretch back to the 14th century, when the Ottoman Empire extended into the region. Ottoman dominance drove an influx of Muslim ethnic groups from outside Europe and led local communities to convert to Islam.
Yet European history is often told as a story of Christians fighting against Ottoman or Arab presence. And in European countries today, Muslims are still often treated as outsiders, especially by far-right leaders in countries like Poland and Hungary.
“All the nations in Europe, both around us and wider, built their identities and national narratives in contrast to Islam,” Suljagić said.
Speaking to survivors
The movie was inspired by accounts of genocide survivors, which the director said she confirmed through multiple sources, as well as video material from news crews embedded with the Bosnian Serb army at the time.
Hasan Nuhanović is one of those survivors. Like Aida, the title character, Nuhanović worked as an interpreter for the UN during the war. The supranational organization had declared Srebrenica a “UN Safe Area” in 1993, aiming to prevent the ethnic cleansing that was occurring throughout the Bosnian War.
So when the city of Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serb army, roughly 30,000 civilians fled to a nearby UN compound. About 6,000 were let in, while the rest camped outside.
But when the Bosnian Serb army arrived at the compound, it was allowed to round up civilians based on an agreement it had negotiated with the UN to transfer them to safety. Instead, most women and children were bussed away from Potočari, and the men, to their deaths.
Nuhanović later detailed his experience in a book, “Under the UN Flag,” which highlights the actions of the international community leading up to and during the genocide.
“The promised air strikes never arrived, even though NATO had a mandate to do so,” he said. A contingent from the Netherlands within the UN was in charge of the safe area at the time. This is also shown in Žbanić’s movie.
Nuhanović, as a UN translator, was allowed to stay behind in the compound.
“I don’t even know how to describe the feeling of being in the emptied compound,” he said. “It’s hard to put to words; I can’t even explain it to myself. It was the worst moment of my life.”
“I don’t know how anyone is supposed to describe seeing their family sent to their deaths,” Nuhanović recalled. “I had to choose between joining them and being killed or being the only one in my family allowed to stay in the compound.”
Nuhanović said that survival is a shared experience that should connect those who were targets of extermination, especially when genocide denial is still present in the Balkans and beyond.
“In the past 25 years,” Nuhanović said, “where the genocide gets negated every day, I realized that the only way to protect ourselves is to act as a collective of people who see their future in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
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