Concentration camp survivors, women victims of conflict-related violence, children that survived war trauma – all conflict-related victims who were not members of armed forces and who live or lived in Republika Srpska during the war should be protected, without any discrimination based on their ethnicity or gender. These are provisions of the Law on the Protection of War Torture Victims […]

Monetary reparations by state institutions are not the end, but rather the beginning of the process of facing the past. They are an acknowledgment of wounds, but do not heal them. The families of victims request acknowledgment, truth and dignity. And that the crimes may never be repeated against anyone. Author: Sanela Karaica Demir Ličina from Bijelo Polje had waited […]

Day of Youth, one of the more important holidays in the former Yugoslavia was forgotten and marked by a different narrative on May 25, 1995. The massacre at Tuzlanska Kapija is an event that changed the collective memory of this day. The Relay of Youth, a relay race held in the honour of Tito slowly became a distant memory, and […]

Heliodrom, a heliport that was used as a concentration camp and controlled by the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), was a place of detention of around 8000 inhabitants of Mostar during the last war. A discussion about turning this space into a museum dedicated to the Croatian Defence Council has been ongoing for quite some time, which is nothing else but […]

Author: Edvin Kanka Ćudić All difficulties faced by the post-war Bosnian and Herzegovinian society result from its failure to face the past. The deeply divided community in political and administrative terms is an advantage for officials using politics, media, but also education to make the process of facing war crimes more complicated, given the fact that they see the process […]

At first glance, the term ”transitional justice” may suggest a specific form of justice that differs from typical judicial proceedings. In essence, it encompasses a series of activities implemented in countries in transition for the purpose of achieving justice, rule of law and reconciliation. This discipline is primarily focused on the need of societies to face their criminal past in […]

Numerous first-aid guides about the process of facing the past agree on the first step, without which the process itself is meaningless: exercising self-understanding. Irrespective of the fact whether the purpose of the process of facing the past is to make future plans (as the last step of facing the past) or the purpose of entering such a process is […]

I graduated from primary and secondary general education school a decade and a half ago. There was no time to learn about our contemporary history in any of the final grades shortly before the end of the school year. That, combined with the fact that even back then I was already interested in and had the privilege to meet different […]

‘‘I was dreaming that they were after me and wanted to kill me…” – This could be a statement by someone who survived the horrors of a war, someone plagued by trauma that is never forgotten, someone whose experience is etched into the deepest part of their consciousness. My name is Mirela. I live and work in Srebrenica. Unfortunately, these […]

The Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) is not only the most important film festival in South East Europe, but also a symbol of unquestionable courage and unwavering spirit of a city that survived one of the most terrible periods in modern history. This festival, which was established in 1995, when the siege of Sarajevo was still part of a horrendous daily […]

Do you know letters of self-compassion? We are not talking about goodbye letters of authors parting with their identities and personalities they inherited nor about notes about the end of social and political systems that authors blindly believed into. We are also not talking about fragmented pseudo dramas in which the ego and superego are substitutes for awareness and morality. […]