Guest Lecture

I found Zala’s lecture extremely informative as well as eye-opening to some of the less talked about issues in Europe. I personally struggled to really engage with the main character in the film For Those who can Tell No Tales.  I think it was perhaps due to the fact she was a tourist and I could not really see the motivation behind her interest in the violent history Bosnia and Herzegovina. Zala’s lecture helped to make the issue more relevant because of her personal connection to it. She was not merely a tourist or a researcher but someone who fled from the war in 1994.

            I found the background on the region that she gave during the lecture helpful in understanding the cultural dynamics that was going on.  The fact that a Yugoslav language was created out of Slavic languages for unification purposes is a fascinating fact as it sheds light on how very different cultures were forced together and the tensions underlying the surface that remained.  After the war happened, people wanted to go back to the “pure” languages.

            Her description of these conflicts as cyclical in nature was the point she made that I found the most powerful. Her argument was that when these issues are not dealt with the first time but rather forgotten about or disregarded, they are certain to happen again. The tensions that erupted into war were a result of past issues not being addressed. I mentioned in class that I saw a lot of similarities between the denials of what had happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the denial of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. There is a great amount of denial and everyone blames the other party. While I was in Turkey, I spoke to several Turks who vehemently denied that the genocide had ever occurred. They had been taught throughout their whole life in school and at home that the genocide never happened. They even blamed the Armenians. Only one person, a minority himself of Kurdish descent, told me that he believed it had happened and that the government was denying it. Zala said that similar denial tactics are being used in the Yugoslav region as textbooks tell extremely slanted versions of history and many facts are left out depending on which story is being told.

            Another interesting point she brought up was how this war was the first time that journalists were accused of symbolic violence. She said that it was not because it was the first time it had happened, as throughout history many filmmakers and journalists have aided war causes like Riefenstahl aiding Hitler, but rather it was a change in international law, which allowed them to be tried for it as a crime. She also spoke on how war rapes were recognized as war crimes for the first time in this war was well. This was a result of women working hard to get the international court to recognize the crimes. This was a result of both the events in Rwanda and Bosnia. Forced impregnation was a part of the strategic ethnic cleansing that was going on during the war.