Hariz Halilovich: Memories of a better future in the aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide

Hariz Halilovich is an anthropologist and senior lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Possibly the only way to explain who you are is to remember who you were, and to take a mental journey into your very intimate past, to the place you left many years ago but you know you will always belong to – though you may never actually return, knowing as you do that the place and the people who made the place won’t be there.

This reflexive sentence came into existence in 2007, at a ‘writing boot camp’ run by historian Ron Adams, who asked me to describe in one sentence how I saw the relationship between place, memory and identity, a topic of my long-term research and a personal interest. Since then I have not only often returned to this sentence, but have made attempts to return to the actual ‘place I left many years ago’, which has proven to be a much more difficult task than re-reading my written thoughts. In other circumstances, I might have long ‘forgotten’ and given up on the place where I happen to have been born as, over the years – since the age of fourteen, when I left my hometown for the first time – I’ve been on the move, literally crossing the planet and developing fond attachments to many different places along the way. 

None of the new places, however, has been able to outgrow the importance of ‘Silvertown’, as the word Srebrenica would translate into English, or ‘Argentaria’ as this ancient settlement was called during Roman times. Spread across the first page of my Australian passport, S-R-E-B-R-E-N-I-C-A almost reads like my name and, like my name, it travels with me wherever I go. Since July 1995, my place of birth has become an even more important mark of identity – more a scar than a mark – with which I strongly identify and am identified with.

Upon learning where I come from, I know what kind of questions to expect from people: How did you survive?, How many family members did you lose?  Although I was not there during the 1992-95 war, the events that took place in Srebrenica at the time have had a profound and irreparable impact on my life, and even more so on the lives of my relatives and friends who remained in the ‘UN safe area’...