Exposing the truth.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010:

We visited the Research and Documentation Center this afternoon, a nondescript building in downtown Sarajevo putting out some of the most intensive war documentation imaginable. We were tired and hungry as we approached the meeting, but I was distracted from my grumbling stomach once we began. Inside the RDC’s large, nondescript, Communist-era building is a clean and comfortable modern office, with books lining the shelves and luxurious chairs facing a wide-screen TV monitor. We listened to two Bosnian women explain their research and watched on the TV as they showed us pieces of their various projects, which are almost all available on the internet. I’ll throw in the link later.

The RDC was organized in 2004 with the mission of empowering Bosnian citizens with true information about the crimes and events of the war. The Center’s other goal, the women explained, was to create a database with that information that would be accessible from around the world, so that the Bosnian diaspora population would be able to access those facts, and so that other people in other countries would learn from the tragedy of what happened here. At the beginning , the project was attacked by many nationalist politicians, who claimed manipulation of the results. However, the research done by the Center is meticulous, and outside evaluators have overseen the project from the start. The results of the work of the RDC are astronomical in scope and sobering in content. But as our presenters explained, they want the information to spread globally, “so that everyone will know what happened and not let it happen again.”

Among their most troubling work was the Memory and Memorials project. During the war, memorials would often appear in places of extreme violence, etc.—but sometimes those memorials were not built for the victims, but for the perpetrators. The RDC was interested in how both innocent victims and nationalistic rhetoric were memorialized, so it began seeking out these places and recording them. Some of the resulting finds are scary: for example, monuments built for Serb soldiers at former detention camps where Bosniaks and Croats were held seem to twist the meaning and sentiment of memorial. But some are beautiful, home-created markers of love and memory that speak poignantly of loss.

The other project which I want to mention here is the Bosnian War Crimes Atlas. Really, it’s a compilation of all the RDC’s work, available online with Google Earth. After downloading the project from the RDC website, you open Google Earth and fly down to Bosnia, zooming in to a map covered with little icons. Each icon represents something from the war—the location of a mosque, the site of a mass grave, a sniper murder, etc. Each is clickable, and opens up to a description, accompanying photos and video, and/or links to related post-war court proceedings and decisions. Each mass grave marker includes a list of victims; each icon has a story. It’s fascinating and troubling. If you want to explore it yourself (and I highly recommend it), check out www.idc.org.ba.