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.
UDIK’s research has found that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in the region, there are a large number of controversial monuments that cause intolerance and conflict in the community.These monuments directly or indirectly represent a different interpretation of history than the official one in the former SFR Yugoslavia. Sometimes it is not about erecting a new monument, but simply about remodeling an existing one. The initiators of monuments often remind us of the suffering and sacrifice made by members of our ethnic groups. They also give us lessons for the future – to stick together, to build a strong and stable national identity against all those who are against us. And according to their views, there are many of them.
According to UDIK’s analyzes of the memorial culture in the region, memorials not only build identity, but also create political ideology, which causes ethnic apartheid – the separation of ethnic groups from each other, in order to present the others as bad or as enemies. Monuments are used to show that all armies were honorable and that their members could not at any moment commit a crime.In addition, there is the victimization of society, in which each party believes that it has suffered the most.
The tendency to build such monuments, which are the result of national constructions, is on the rise. At the same time, the construction of memorials to civilian war victims who were killed only because they were members of other ethnic communities is contested. It is inevitable that today’s politics of memory and their strategies of representation of the war past of the 1990s only deepen the already existing conflicts of memory and make the mutual visible and invisible lines that separate us become even more expressive.
