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Episode 39 – Cinema Srebrenica with Alma Mustafic and Emir Suljagic

Alma Mustafic: When I looked at this movie, I was thinking it doesn’t even come close to our fear. The moment that you have to leave the compound… You know…  I cannot describe it. I was so scared. You are actually no longer alive. Your soul has left your body. That’s how I felt. I was paralyzed with fear.

[INTRO TUNE]

Asymmetrical Haircuts Justice Update with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg in partnership with justiceinfo.net.

Stephanie: Hi, welcome to asymmetrical haircuts. I’m Stephanie van den Berg 

Janet: and I’m Janet Anderson.

Stephanie: And for this episode, we’re returning to Srebrenica, the Srebrenica massacre. It’s the atrocity that’s the most extensively dealt with by international justice and domestic courts in Bosnia and also the Netherlands.

Janet: And now it’s also the subject of an highly acclaimed movie, Quo Vadis, Aida, by Bosnian director, Jasmila Žbanić. And I’m the person who doesn’t speak BCS in this podcast. And yet I’m the one who gets to say her name to start with. The movie has won a slew of prizes and is in the running for an Oscar. And it’s gotten considerable buzz. Here for a taste is the trailer.

[TRAILER]

What is the point of having an automaton if you don’t deliver? 

They are killing people outside. 

What difference does it make whether the Serbs kill us or you do?

Janet: Such a film helps to define the image that we have of a mass atrocity like the Srebrenica massacre, and it shows people what actually happened, but such a popular film also risks narrowing the view and cementing a particular narrative.

Stephanie: To talk about this, we invited two people who were actually there. We have Alma Mustafic and Emir Suljagic, who were at the UN base in Potočari when refugees flocked to the Dutch peacekeepers in hopes of protection. They now have both dedicated their time to educating people about what happened in Srebrenica.

Hi, Emir.

Hi, Alma.

Emir Suljagić: Hello 

Alma Mustafic: Hi.

Stephanie: We’ll start with you, Alma.

Do you want to introduce yourself, say a bit briefly about how you came to be at the compound and what made you turn to telling people about what happened?

Alma Mustafic: Yes. Well, in 1995, I survived Srebrenica, but my brother and my father who worked for Dutchbat and many other family members didn’t survive. So when Srebrenica fell, my father took us to his work to the compound in Potočari because he was sure that we will be protected there. We spent two days in this compound and on July 13, we were forced to leave this safe area. And even my father who was working for Dutchbat and he has (the) right to stay at the compound, he was sent away.

So after Srebrenica, my mother, my brother, baby sister and I, we are moving to the Netherlands and we hold the Dutch state responsible for the death of my father. And Supreme Court ruled in our favor, that was back in 2013. The Dutch state was 100% responsible for the death of my father. 

And nowadays I work as educational expert lecturer and researcher at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. And I try to increase knowledge, you know, and awareness about genocide to ensure that something like this never happened again. I try to challenge the Dutch educational institution schools to include Srebrenica in their educational programme.

Janet: Alma, thanks so much for sharing all of the details and we’ll go into some more specifics of the things that you’ve just spoken about, but already you’ve just brought us straight in to the whole story of Srebrenica.

We also have Emir Suljagić, again, apologies if I’m saying your name slightly incorrectly or very incorrectly, who’s the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre and a professor at the International University of Sarajevo.

Hi Emir, again.

Stephanie: Emir was an interpreter for the UN in Srebrenica at the time of the massacre, like the protagonist of Quo vadis, Aida and survived because of his UN employee status. He later became a journalist and ended up reporting on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where we met in the early 2000s. He wrote about his experience in a very moving book called Postcards from the Grave. And he had a stint in Bosnian politics as a regional minister for education, but returned to academics and now heads up the Memorial Center, set up at the former Dutchbat Base. 

What was it like, Emir, for you to see kind of the film version of you? Not so much, Aida is the interpreter. You were the other interpreter. You were joking on Twitter that, you know, you’ll be remembered for smoking and kissing the girls in the movie, because that’s what the other interpreter seems to be doing.

Emir Suljagić: Well, I mean, there’s really nothing wrong with being remembered like that. I don’t mind that, at the very least. Actually, a lot of friends of mine were calling after seeing the movie and saying, okay, so this is what you did. You told everyone was gonna be dead killed. You smoked pot and you made love to a woman. All right, so this is you, right? It actually happened. And I was like, come on guys, you know, don’t do that to me.

Now, if we’re talking about the movie, let’s just say what the movie is not about. The movie is not about the entirety of what happened in Srebrenica.

It’s a movie about a subplot within the plot that was within the drama that was taking place in Potočari between July 11th and July 13th. It’s geographically limited to the space, to the area of the UN base, the Dutchbat base here in Potočari. It’s temporarily limited to only three days and it’s limited to a few… relatively few number of actors. There were a lot more actors here. The picture is a lot bigger.

But I guess telling this story in its entirety is much more complex and it’s a much more expensive undertaking than focusing on this tiny little bit within the story because relatively speaking is comparatively small within the larger picture of what was going on in Srebrenica. The film leaves out the death march, the mass executions that were the result of (the) death march. There was only out of a series of mass executions and only one as far as I know was the result of what was going on in Potočari. The men who were selected in Potočari were actually killed on morning of July 15th after staying overnight in Bratunac between July 13th and July 14th.

So now, it doesn’t… once again, the movie doesn’t pretend or purport to be telling the whole story. And that’s good about it. It’s honest. It’s, you know, saying, okay, this is what happened here. This is one tiny little bit of it. It doesn’t happen to be saying any…  it doesn’t want to be saying any ideological narratives. It’s not telling, you know, it’s not ideological at all. It’s, I mean, having been in the middle of it, you know, it’s adapted to what an ordinary person who has got nothing to do with that can actually put up with.

Janet: Alma, what about you? How did it feel for you? Was it strange to see these kinds of images? I mean, what I imagine is that it might feel like it’s become somebody else’s story, that it’s become kind of a show business spectacle or did it feel right to you?

Alma Mustafic: It felt okay. When I looked at this movie, you know, I was thinking it doesn’t even come close to our fear. The moment that you have to leave the compound, you know, I cannot describe it. I was so scared. You are actually no longer alive. You know, your soul has left your body. That’s how I felt. I was paralyzed with fear. So I think it’s difficult to even come close to how we felt right… right then.

But let me say this: as educational expert, I think those films are extremely important for raising awareness about this genocide among a general large public.

And this is nothing new. We have seen this with films about Holocaust, you know. They had great impact among large public. So it’s essential that there is a movie about Srebrenica from perspective of victims. And this is the first one. But I think we need more of those movies, you know, because just like Emir said, this is eliminated to two, three days. And we have to tell all of our stories. And of course, (the) experience that Emir had, or for example, I had, are different. I was (a) 14 years old girl. He was a young man. I had different fears. I was extremely afraid of being raped, just like any woman, you know. And of course, I was also afraid that my father and my brother would be killed. But I knew, I knew if I was killed, I would be raped first. So somehow, I was jealous of my brother, you know, at that time, which sounds crazy, but I was jealous of him being (a) boy while I was a girl. And when I heard that there was a film, you know, coming from a woman’s perspective, I did expect that more attention would be paid to rape. Many women still don’t talk about it. They think it shouldn’t be about them because they managed to survive somehow, but our men didn’t. They were killed, and we should talk about them, about men’s fate.

And I think when we talk about genocide in general, we should talk about (the) fate of group of people, you know, as a nation, (the) fate of men, fate of women and children, because genocide is about intention to destroy a group as a whole, men, women and children. And I understand that we cannot put everything in one single movie, so that’s why we need more of those movies to be made from the perspective of victims. And maybe next movie should be made from the child perspective, you know, just like the boy in striped pajamas. And now we know that this movie had a huge impact on Holocaust education and awareness in, let’s say, popular younger population, just because it was made from child perspective.

Stephanie: When I saw the movie, what struck me is how close it was kind of choreographed to look also like the videos I’ve seen in court of the compound, but what the movie did that the court videos didn’t is that it put me in the middle of the mass of people. The movie really did show that complete, you know, what the hell is going to happen here. And that fear was very palpable. And I thought that was translated very well, complete with that. You don’t really have an idea of what to do. So in a way, it deepened a bit my understanding of it as well.

How important is Jasmila Žbanić in this? We have a quote from her where she explains she didn’t record it in Potočari herself, but she recorded it in Mostar. And she’s talking a bit about how getting extras from Bosnia also really helped the way she tells the story.

Jasmila Žbanić: In the film, it was what I learned while making the film. There were many extras who did survive concentration camps and they did survive torture. Like there was one scene where I was telling extras, please go to this truck and do like this. And there was one man who said, it’s not what they did to us. It’s not the way they did to us. And I was like, what? And he said, I was in concentration camp and I know when they are transporting us how they did it. So I said, okay, we will listen to him. How he explains what we should do. We will do it.

Stephanie: Emir, do you think this movie could be made the way it would be by some international director?

Emir Suljagić: I think this is a lot more to do with the way the movie is. There’s a lot more to do with the person of Jasmila Žbanić and the fact that she’s a Bosnian coming from this very specific cultural context. It’s a very… you know …  My experience of the movie was that of intimacy. It’s a very intimate film, very close. There’s a warmth to it that’s really… I think that the warmth of this movie is really what makes it shocking, that she chose to tell this story in this particular way, and that her warmth and her.. this intimacy in her approach contrasted to, in contrast to what we know is the outcome, and what we see at the end is the outcome, is what makes the movie very shocking.

Because we get to know pretty much everybody there you know, and we get to know them as they wanted us to know. We get to see, for instance, Ratko Mladić as he actually wanted to see himself back in 1995. We get to see the UN as they wanted to see, as they saw themselves back in 1995. So, and we see… we see… the victims as they also saw themselves back in 1995, which is helpless, defenseless.

On a personal level, as Alma put it, you’re dead already. When people ask me, I left here on July 21st, though I stayed on for another week. And I sometimes joke, although it’s not very much of a joke, with friends that, you know, when they asked me what my experience was, I sometimes retort that I was dead for 10 days. Actually, the thing is, there were actual reports that I was dead. My mom was informed that I was dead. I met a UN investigator in 2002 who told me, I met him in The Hague, and he told me, what are you doing here? I have actual statements of people saying that you were taken behind the building and shot. And I was like, okay, hold on.

So that was the actual experience. And I can, you know, the movie that Alma and I would like to see is never going to be made. We are never going to get a chance to reenact that part of our lives. And I know that’s what we all want. What we want to do is we want an opportunity to reenact that part of our lives and change the outcome. That’s what we want. That’s never going to happen. This is, you know, this film is a tribute to what we had survived. But as every tribute, it every tribute, you know, eventually down the road, pales in comparison to the actual experience. And we shouldn’t put that burden on a single film. We shouldn’t put that burden on a single person to make it up to us. It cannot be done.

Stephanie: Alma, you wanted to react?

Alma Mustafic: Well, I think I couldn’t agree more with Emir, you know, but I think we could try to tell all of our stories. And there are some small steps, you know. For example, I’m involved in a theatre play right now called Dangerous Names. And in the Netherlands, we had like eight plays about Srebrenica. And all of them were from a Dutch perspective. But none from (the) perspective of victims. And Dangerous Names is the first play in the Netherlands from the perspective of victims. And I’m one of the players, which is odd. And another one is the former Dutch soldier. And together with other three professionals, actors, we tell the story of Srebrenica. From my perspective, it’s about my story, you know. And the story of this Dutch soldier is only support my story. How it should be, let’s say.

And in the beginning, no one wanted, you know, to see this. I remember (the) theatre saying, no, thank you. We already have one play on Srebrenica. It’s a play about Radovan. And we tried to explain, but you don’t have one from perspective of victims. No, one play on Srebrenica topic was enough. So we had a few tryouts before everything went down, you know. And (the) National Theatre newspaper was there. And after watching this play, they gave us (the) choice of critic, which can be compared to five stars. And then another theatre start to call us. Like suddenly everybody wanted to put our play in their program. 

So this is some proof that people do want to see all of our stories, you know, from perspective of victims. We should just go on and try to make all those stories. So I learned from this film next thing. When I made an agreement with this theatre project, I was very keen on truth. Sometimes we had discussions for 45 minutes about one single sentence. We have been working two years on this script, because everything had to be as much truthful and authentic as possible. That was very important to me.

Janet: What do you think, Alma? Do you think that these artistic representations actually help to define what truth is and to combat denialism? Or can people actually use them and say, oh, come on, it’s all just make believe, if you’re just showing it in theatre and films?

Alma Mustafic: Well, one way or another, it does help to raise awareness on this genocide. But when we talk about denial, there are many forms of denial and it’s very hard to combat them all. In addiction to real deniers, like a lot of people in the region, they just say it didn’t happen. But there are some people who just try to downplace Srebrenica genocide by calling a different name like mass killings or massacre. They try to avoid the word genocide, but that’s also denial and using a different name or term won’t make less evil, I think. 

So this is why this movie is important. Some of the people are unaware of their downplaying, like Dutch people, for example. Focusing only on Dutch when we talk about Srebrenica is also downplaying Srebrenica genocide. So this Dutch attitude of Srebrenica genocide is very problematic. They always put Dutch at the center, you know, the narrative of Srebrenica, and in doing so, they help to minimize those human scars of the genocide in Srebrenica, like Emir put it, and to limit our story to the minimums of the European history. So this can also be seen as a form of genocide denial.

And when we have this movie, you know, and the larger public can see it, I hope they start asking themselves, okay, is this way that I look at Srebrenica, is this okay, or do I have to do some more research on this topic?

Stephanie: When I watched somebody put on Facebook this interview with the main actor who plays Mladić, and he was actually explaining that he wanted to keep as close to the videos as possible and as close to the dialogue as possible exactly to combat that denialism, because he wanted when people saw the movie that they wouldn’t be able to say: “oh, this is different, so the whole movie is not true” but he wanted to stay as close to Mladić as possible. And I don’t have that clip, because he spoke in Serbian, but I do have also, yes, Mila talking about why they were so precise with Mladić.

Jasmila Žbanić: It was not easy, because Mladić is considered (a) hero in Serbia, where Boris lives, and he is a war criminal for the rest of the world. So we were very careful how to show him.

First, we decided to keep most of his lines like he told them. You know, we changed only a few, but Boris also insisted on being precise in order of the lines, because we thought this guy is saying something which we can’t write, which we can’t imagine. It’s so packed with his character every word he’s using that we should keep this. And the key for me to unlock this character was a fact that he was always with (a) camera person. He was always directing. He says, go to other side, film them, not me. You know, film this flag. He was the worst director that one can imagine, who has no power on creating beauty, but creating death. He had (a) feeling of himself as a god. He was actor and director at the same time of this horror.

Stephanie: Emir, the Memorial Center has to do with a lot of denial. I mean, you’re based in Potočari. Srebrenica is now run by the Republika Srpska, who don’t acknowledge the genocide. You know, does this movie in a way help you with the denial or have you gotten more of a backlash of denial based on the movie because I don’t know, Serbs are angry that it’s gotten all this Oscar buzz.

Emir Suljagić: Let me sort of try and answer your question in two parts. Memorial Center is a unique institution in the sense that it is run by survivors or first generation or second generation survivors or people who have lost someone here But literally all of us here are actually really scarred people, scarred individuals by the events in Srebrenica themselves. And we are doing it in an environment that’s openly hostile towards us. Imagine, once again, it’s a very crude analogy, but imagine a group of Jewish survivors going back to a Nazi-occupied part of Poland where Auschwitz was and trying to… And once again, it’s a very crude analogy. I’m not trying to… But … So genocide denial is constant. And in that regard, the political geography has changed also to accommodate genocide denial, to accommodate the notion that this is Serb territory, that we have come back to a completely changed political geography that actually is produced with the intent of producing a different kind of territory here, a different kind of, you know, to send us a message that this is someone else’s land, that we are alien here. So this is the environment where the Srebrenica Memorial Center is actually working, and this is where it’s all happening.

And in that regard, movies has only done good for us. The movie has been good to us because it has risen awareness of Srebrenica to… to… it has brought Srebrenica to the quarters that have ignored it, either willingly or unwillingly. It has once again risen awareness about what happened here, about the word Srebrenica now has been spoken over the past few months more than ever in the previous 25 years. So, I’m not concerned, at the same time, I’m really not concerned with the sort of nationalist pushback on the movie. Once again, this is part and parcel of that narrative. The pushback, the denial is the integral part of the Srebrenica narrative of what happened here. So, yeah, the movie has been good to us. I have to be honest and we should thank Jasmila for reaching out, for creating something that has managed to reach out to so many people.

Janet: And Alma, you’re based in the Netherlands, which you’ve mentioned, and you’ve mentioned the way that the Dutch focus in the discussion on Srebrenica has a lot of different layers going on. There’s the shame, the backlash, and you’re trying to educate people. But you’re also involved in this 12-year legal battle with the Dutch government. Do you think that this movie can actually contribute in any way to real justice issues and to accountability issues?

Alma Mustafic: Of course. My answer would be of course. Let me start with the first one. I think Dutch people need this film more than we do. Because when we talk about Srebrenica in the Netherlands, we always talk about one moment, one place, and one perspective. You know, it’s just July 11th, city of Srebrenica, and it’s always from Dutch perspective. And this is very dangerous in long term, in my opinion. And it doesn’t support us battling this denial, you know. And in this way, we forget the main thing, genocide. How can genocide happen? You know, and genocide doesn’t happen in one day or even in one week, just like people in the Netherlands think, or in just one single city. With this narrative of Srebrenica, we are not going to learn anything from this genocide, you know. To understand genocide, we need to learn something from it. We need other perspectives. Like we said, we need the stories of survivors, but we also need to learn about preparatory motives. Why did they do what they did? And these are the things that we never learn in the Netherlands. So I hope Dutch people watching this movie will try to answer those questions as well.

For example, last year we had lots of attention for Srebrenica conglomeration here in the Netherlands. But then again, it was mainly about Dutchbat soldiers. We have more than 60,000 Bosnians in the Netherlands. We hardly ever see them on television, you know. And I think that’s the wrong focus. When we talk about Srebrenica, we should tell those stories, you know, stories of survivors. And… But when people talk about Srebrenica here in the Netherlands, they always talk about civil war, you know, like civil war and genocide are two different things. Genocide never appears to their minds. So, and even though this was planned genocide, like recently, Emir did show us genocide suspect this research program. I think it proves that Srebrenica was planned genocide. But in the Netherlands, they always invite some military guy, you know, to talk about military mission in Bosnia, about war, about two sides. They never invite a professor of genocide, you know, to tell us about Srebrenica and genocide in Bosnia. And that narrative needs to change.

People are not aware of the fact that last genocide in Europe was in Bosnia 25 years ago. Ask a random, you know, Dutch guy, when was the last genocide in Europe? And everybody will say 75 years ago. So this is the danger of this one-sided perspective. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not like those Dutchbat stories are not important, but that story is about 5% of the whole story, you know, and should be supportive to the story of genocide survivors. 95% should be about genocide itself, but here in the Netherlands it’s the other way around.

Stephanie: Srebrenica is in the Dutch canon of history, and I looked up the paragraph about Srebrenica, and there’s two paras about peace missions, and there’s two paras about the actual genocide, which again starts by stressing that Dutchbat was, quote, lightly armed and had few ways to keep the peace in the enclave, and the responsibility paragraph stresses the NIOD report, which found that Dutchbat was on a mission impossible, and it finally ends by, and it says, it has a sentence saying families are still fighting in Dutch courts about government responsibility, and it ends with Srebrenica is still an open wound. So that’s the thing that is now in the Dutch canon.

Alma Mustafic:You know, this is the thing that you get when you let military officers write history about Holocaust. You know, Mark van Berkel? He’s a Dutch, he holds PhD degrees on (the) topic Holocaust in history books. He did (a) similar research on Srebrenica education in history book in Dutch education. And his conclusion was devastating. He knows where he’s talking about because he understands genocides, you know.

Three main conclusions were, first, there is hardly any learning about Srebrenica. Sometimes just two or three sentences in one whole book. Two, if there is any learning, then it’s not complete or it’s not correct. In fact, fake news. And three, it’s from one side, only from Dutch perspective, which means that the word genocide often does not even appear. So we have here in the Netherlands (the) following problem: 

On the one hand, we have research that proves that education about Srebrenica is failing. And on the other hand, Srebrenica is included in the canon of Dutch history, just like you said, which means that students have to learn about Srebrenica. But what are they going to learn about Srebrenica? Future teachers don’t get to learn about Srebrenica themselves. So how can they teach future generations about the last genocide in Europe if they have never learned themself?

Janet: Emir, you’ve been, I don’t know, working on this field for a long time. You’ve been a journalist writing about it. You’re now running the Memorial Center. So focus on this. Do you ever wish that your life wasn’t just defined by this thing that happened and that you could work in some other sphere?

Emir Suljagić: I did spend time doing other things. I’ve been lucky in the sense that I’ve had a profession, how can I say, I had a job that required me to get up in the morning and go to work and feed my family. I was the breadwinner in the family. So I had to, immediately after getting out of Srebrenica, I actually had to find a job. And I was lucky in that it was in journalism. And no matter how I felt about certain things, Stephanie and I worked closely together when I was in The Hague. And she knows.

I was out there on the gallery of that courtroom together with all other journalists. I had to report on it. I had to file my articles. My editors didn’t really care about how I felt about it. I had to do it for a foreign media outlet. So in that sense, it’s kind of been helpful to me that I have been very lucky. I’ve been very lucky that at the age of 21, I got into what was back then probably the best newspaper in Bosnia. It was a weekly called Dani. But yeah, I had completely different ideas about my life. I would have much preferred to have spent the past 25 years of my life hanging out with my childhood friends, going down to the Drina River bank and swimming in the summer. Of course, I’ve wished so many times that all of it had played out differently. For the most part, this was not necessarily the first thing people think about me. I have other qualifications. I have a character that’s completely independent of what had happened between 1992 and 1995. I have character flaws that have nothing to do with that. Not everything comes out from PTSD, for goodness sake.

So… Yeah.. To be honest, I have tried for a very long time to get out from under this burden of being a victim. It’s a burden, to be honest. I don’t want to be seen as one. I’ve been striving to be seen as one. I see myself as a survivor. I see my friends as survivors, first and foremost. Because what we have survived is actually important. 

Janet: I’ll just say in case some listeners notice, I think you’ve got some big building work going on around you. I hope that the memorial centre is being expanded or something in case they hear the banging around.

Emir Suljagić: Believe it or not, we actually have somewhere in the area of 1.5 million euros worth of construction work going on as we speak. So, yeah, I’m very happy about it.

Alma Mustafic: I wanted to ask Alma, Emir talks about being very defined. In a way, I think you’re relatively unknown if you say your name to Dutch people. You’re maybe less defined by victimhood. Nobody knows that this happened to you in Dutch society. How is that for you?

Alma Mustafic: I chose not to be known as a victim in the beginning. So when we came to the Netherlands, I didn’t want to be seen as a victim, just like Emir said. So I worked very hard. I went to school, to university. You go to work, you try to pay your bills, and then you have this legal case against the Dutch state. And I didn’t talk a lot about Srebrenica outside the court. I had one experience with a colleague, and it wasn’t pleasant, because I tried to speak about Srebrenica. And that was 25 years ago, I think. So for years I hide behind my professional life, you know, and my professional life, and my personal life were separately two different things, just because I didn’t want people to see me as a victim.

And it took me 25 years to realize that I am not a victim, that I am a survivor, just like Emir said, and not talking about Srebrenica, you know, is weak. So I have to talk about Srebrenica, because a lot of people died so that I could talk. So it was just last year that I realized, okay, right now I’m going to publish this article on my LinkedIn page, because before that you couldn’t find nothing about Srebrenica on my professional page. I wanted to be a good educational expert and a good teacher and stuff like that, but I didn’t want people to see me as a victim.

Janet: Alma and Emir, thank you so much for exploring a variety of issues with us, all come to our mind because of the fact that this film has come out, which I have not seen yet, so I’m planning to see it as soon as possible. And we’re holding our thumbs or whatever it is that you do in order to hope that it gets an Oscar for what it is.

To wrap up the podcast, we always ask a number of questions, and the first one to both of you is, is there anything that you wish that we’d asked you that you didn’t get a chance to say? So, Emir, to start with?

Emir Suljagić: Every time I keep my mouth shut, I do myself a favour, so yeah, you’re fine.

Janet: And Alma?

Alma Mustafic: Well, I think we could talk about Srebrenica for three days, but this is the main.

Janet: And our final question, the one that we actually enjoy asking very much, is what are you reading? Or listening to or watching at the moment you’d like to share with us as what’s on your bookshelf, what’s in your Netflix queue, and it doesn’t have to be at all justice related. What you’re doing, Alma?

Alma Mustafic: When I read, it’s usually about genocide. So right now I am reading Genocide en de crisis van Yugoslavia, 1908-1995. It’s from a Dutch author. I just wanted to see how they look at this genocide, because I read a lot about genocide in Bosnia from English and American authors, Bosnian authors, but never a Dutch author, because I couldn’t find someone who really understands what was happening there. And this guy seems like he understands it. So that’s what I’m reading, and I’m watching Tiger Woods right now. It’s very interesting to see how somebody can get so big, you know, and then do all those mistakes, makes all those mistakes.

Stephanie: Emir, what are you doing besides singing The Wheels on the Bus or Ježeva kućica reading?

Janet: Do you wanna explain why you are asking? 

Stephanie: I’m asking that because Emir has a new baby, and I’m trying to dig in my brain, because when I had my son, we moved to Serbia when he was four months old. So I have a lot of the kind of Yugoslav childhood. 

Emir Suljagić: Then you are certainly familiar with Džudža Džudža Trebavić. 

Stephanie: Yes.

Emir Suljagić: Yes. And also there’s a song that goes something like We went to Africa to plant paprika, which she for some reason loves.

Stephanie: Oh, Misha [ed -Stef’s son] knows it inside and out. I will play a clip. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Emir Suljagić:That’s it! That’s what I’m listening to now. I’m reading. I’m sort of at the very start of a research that’s based on the intercepted telephone conversations between Milošević, Karadžić, Krajišnik and Plavšić.

The outcome of the research should be for me to be able to put those conversations into historical context and to explain that there’s this really cool theory by Daniele Conversi about the Serbian secession from the center. And I sort of want to test that proposition of secession from the center based on the conversations that were recorded between the leadership of Serbia and Bosnia and Serbs in 1991 and 1992 to show that there’s also a lot of, you know, talking about genocide and talking about Turks and, you know, I’m at the start of it and conversations are really morbid sometimes because these guys thought they were talking privately. They didn’t know they were being recorded. And, you know, there’s a lot of conversations between Karadžić and Dobrica Ćosić and Serb poets and philosophers with another one, Karadžić and Milošević is there as well. And I want to sort of try and fill this kind of gap that exists when it comes to the Bosnia genocide.

It’s, you know, it’s very interesting that a lot of people write about genocide in Bosnia and about genocide in Serbia and Srebrenica, but no one ever, I mean, there’s so few people actually go and look at the documents. You know, there’s this misconception that Bosnian… was, Bosnian genocide was something that happened in, you know, in dark Bosnian woods that there’s no record of it, that when, as Stephanie knows, this is probably one of, among the best documented mass murders in history. I mean, these guys wrote everything. These guys wrote everything down to log books for bulldozers that went to dig mass graves.

So I want to try and address that as well. And right now, once again, I’m doing, I’m looking at the documents. I’ll be reading some historical stuff later on to try and sort of frame these conversations, put them in their historical context. Eventually, I’m hoping to publish that and to publish a collection of these conversations like we did with the Bosnia Serb Assembly transcripts.

I’m watching, what am I watching? I’ve started watching Breeders last night because it corresponds to how I’m feeling right now. It’s about a married couple with two kids under seven. So yeah, that’s how I’m feeling right now. I’m also watching, there’s a great show that’s completely been pushed to the background by this Narcos franchise. It’s called Snowfall. It’s about the social implications of the crack cocaine health crisis in the US in the 70s. And it’s like the receiving end of the Narcos. If there was a reverse story to Narcos, then this would be it. And I’m also watching this really great show that’s called The Snowpiercer. It’s like a sort of utopian, dystopian kind of thing. Anything that has to do with the end of the world, I’m there. I like it.

Janet: Wow, what an amazing range of recommendations and amazing cast of characters that you’re looking at, Emir. You know.. So much stuff, so rich and so many different suggestions there. We’ll put them all onto our webpage.

Stephanie: We’ll definitely put a link, so what Alma briefly mentioned and Emir as well, is there’s a whole project from the Srebrenica Memorial Center about genocide now and the transcripts of what Bosnian Serb officials actually said. And it’s really black and white, and you can basically read it from day to day how this is planned out and this whole idea that it didn’t just kind of appear in Mladić’s brain on the 13th that, hey, we have all these people, let’s kill them. There’s a whole organization and they documented everything and it’s fascinating. So we’ll definitely link to that.

Janet: Okay, Genocide nerds alert here. Fascinating stuff for us all to look at. Thank you all so much for giving your time and for giving me my pronunciation of your names. So thank you.

Stephanie: Thank you so much, guys.

[OUTRO MUSIC]