A few months before its end, one of the key events and the biggest crime in the three years of interethnic wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina took place in Srebrenica. At the beginning of July 1995, members of the Bosnian Serb forces initially occupied the area, which had been under the protection of the United Nations since 1993, and then killed thousands of men of the majority Muslim population, and forced women and children to flee. The Srebrenica crime, later also characterized as genocide, as one of the most tragic moments of the Bosnian war, is receiving notice also in literature, among other things it is, in a particular way, thematized in the autobiography Nobody of Mehmedalija Alić. As a foreigner without citizenship and employment, Alić stays bureaucratically trapped in Slovenia after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the independence of its republics, where he moved from his native Srebrenica vicinity in aspiration for a better future during his schooling time. Hence, he exposes the crime indirectly through the testimony of surviving relatives and friends, and with the memory of those deceased who failed to survive the genocide. Discovery of extrajudicially killed victims after Second World War with which he met as miner in Huda jama mine in Laško, is a remembrance of tragic events from 1995. As Alić compares both mass murders he feels an obligation to treat posthumous remains with respect, because of his own experience in Srebrenica. Poor life experiences in both Srebrenica and later in Slovenia, where he was ill-treated as Bosniak, aren't reflected in negative image of The Other. Instead of stereotyping and generalization, the author clearly draws a line between those responsible for crimes and mistakes and representatives from other nations, when he could be easily biased.
|