What happens to children who grow up with war? How do they live with the daily reality of danger, hunger, and loss and how does it shape the adults they become?
In Then They Started Shooting (Harvard University Press), child psychiatrist Lynne Jones draws the reader into the compelling stories of Serbian and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian wars of the 1990s. These children endured hardship, loss, family disruption, and constant uncertainty, and yet in a blow to psychiatric orthodoxy, few showed lasting signs of trauma. Thoughts of their personal futures filled their minds, not memories of war.
Nonetheless, Jones suggests in a chilling conclusion, the war affected them deeply. Officially citizens of the same country, the two communities live separate, wary lives. The Muslims hope for reconciliation but cannot believe in it while so many cannot go home and war criminals are still at large. The Serbs resent the outside world, NATO, and fear the return of their Muslim neighbors. Cynical about politics, all of them mistrust their elected leaders. War may end, but the persistence of corruption and injustice keep wounds from healing.
On January 26, OSI sponsored a discussion with Lynne Jones to mark her book's publication. Jones was joined by Mirza Kusljugic, Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations, and documentary photographer Sara Terry, whose photo project, "Aftermath: Bosnia s Long Road to Peace" (a book by the same title will be published by Channel Photographics in September 2005), explores the many challenges still confronting Bosnia, more than nine years after the Dayton Peace Accords.
Summary
It is almost ten years since the Srebrenica massacre and the Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia. It is a decade since Radovan Karadzic and his general Ratko Mladic were indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. They remain at large.
Against this background, OSI hosted a panel discussion on January 26, 2005, with Lynne Jones, author of Then They Started Shooting, Bosnian Ambassador to the UN Mirza Kusljugic, and documentary photographer Sara Terry. They discussed the war and its aftermath, and what kind of state Bosnia is today.
Jones, who is a child psychiatrist, explained that the children who came of age during the conflict have yet to confront its legacy. She looks at the long-term psychological impact of the ethnic cleansing campaigns in two Bosnian towns—Foca and Gorazde, which, though less than 50 kilometers apart, are separated by far more. Once multiethnic communities in federal Yugoslavia , the towns are now on opposite sides of the former front lines—one in Republika Srpska and the Federation.
Jones said that most of the children she interviewed—whom she saw intermittently over the period of 1992–2002—showed no signs of trauma. Instead, many seemed indifferent or uninterested in what had happened. But this emotional detachment meant that many of the children were not aware of the war’s repercussions for their counterparts in the neighboring town. “Distancing oneself from the past could be protective, but in some contexts it had costs for the community as a whole.” Moreover, she found a wide gulf in perspectives on the war. Serb children in Foca continue to believe they would have been killed if Muslim residents had not been expelled, whereas Muslim children in Gorazde hope for reconciliation.
Ambassador Kusljugic echoed Jones’s concerns over the disparities between the two communities. “We are living in parallel societies,” he said. He said that Bosnians suffered from what he called societal fatigue and the international community is focused now on rebuilding state infrastructure and improving the economy. However, Kusljugic asked, “Is it possible to build a state if you don’t build a nation at the same time?” He urged Bosnian young people—many of whom, he said, feared another war—to press for the country’s citizens to confront the past in order to move to the future.
Jones’s and Kusljugic’s presentations were offset by Sara Terry's photographs. Terry, who has photographed in Bosnia extensively since 2000, has focused on how Bosnians have sought a return to normal life in the aftermath of conflict. She showed photographs of children and teenagers who had been displaced by ethnic cleansing or had witnessed their parents’ murders, and also images of how some Bosnian children have worked to bridge ethnic division.