UDIK Udruženje za društvena istraživanja i komunikacije
The International Day for Monuments and Sites (World Heritage Day) is held on 18 April each year around the world with different types of activities, including visits to monuments and heritage sites, conferences, round tables and newspaper articles. It was proposed by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and approved by the General Assembly of UNESCO.
The Association for Social Research and Communication (UDIK) is the creator of the Central Register of Monuments (CES) which includes data on monuments dedicated to the war victims of the 1990s in the territory of Yugoslavia. According to the CES, more than 3,500 monuments were built in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia.These are the results of research implemented in 2016.
According to the research, more than 2,100 monuments devoted to civilians and fighters killed during the Bosnian war were built in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most monuments in the Federation were built in the Tuzla Canton (288), the Sarajevo Canton (270), the Zenica-Doboj Canton (238) and the Una-Sana Canton (228). In the Republika Srpska, the higher number of mapped monuments is in the region of Bijeljina, including a subregion Zvornik (231).
In Bosnia of today there is no official common memory. Instead, there are more distinctive politics of memory which are reflected through the monuments. At a time when the sociopolitical situation is burdened by nationalism, by the constant creation of the memory, by the establishment of traditions and the redefinition of the attitude towards the memory “of the previous society”, a large number of monuments built in the period 1992-1995 serve as witnesses. They testify to the need of the society which has undergone the traumatic war events and suffering in order to keep those events in their memory. But at the same time, the number shows how the construction of the monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina represents an important political issue on the basis of which the official structures are very active in demonstrating the ethnocentric memory in the public space.
The process of memorization and the construction of monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina show the crucial role of memory in the process of building our aspect of the recent past.Despite the importance of this issue, there is still no established legal regulation at the state level that would clearly prescribe the basic criteria for the construction of monuments, as well as the transparent distribution of funds for these purposes.
The analysis of the monuments for the period of 1992-1995 and facts on the ground largely confirm the opposing, exclusive, conflicting narratives of the ethnocentric culture of remembrance, present at today Bosnia and Herzegovina’s social and public scene. The number of monuments increases on a daily basis and they are still abused for the national homogenization and shaping socially desirable interpretations of war events.
It is obvious that today’s memory policies use memorials as tools in implementing their strategies of representing the wartime past of the 1990s, which only deepens the already existing conflicts of memory and makes the mutual visible and invisible lines that separate us even more expressive