WOMEN RECOLLECTING MEMORIES: GENDER DIMENSION
With the inception of the wars in former Yugoslavia, women victims of war rapes became incarnated symbols and national metaphors: Raped Bosnian woman (Croat woman, Albanian woman, Serb woman…) symbolized the “raped” Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo… At the same time, the media started presenting images of sexy young women in military uniforms. Women were constructed as symbols on whose bodies all nationalisms of the region inscribed their state-funding projects and their “thousand years old dreams”. Individual women and feminist groups that did not conform to state orchestrated nationalism were declared traitors and un-feminine.
Women were the victims of ethnic conflicts, but women also played an active role in resisting to war and nationalisms. Immediately after the wars stopped, women’s suffering and sexual war violence upon them disappeared from public memory. Although peace is valued today, women’s resistance to armed conflicts and nationalisms has been erased from collective memory.
Women’s project of reconstructing memories starts from the premise that dealing with the past and memories strongly influences the processes of transitional justice, facing the past, reconciliation, seeking the truth and, inasmuch, creating conditions for stability, democratic development and lasting peace in the region. This cannot be achieved without active participation of women. If for no other reasons, then because women and women’s groups are the bearers of memories about continuous peace building activities.
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CONCLUSIONS OF THE CONFERENCE WOMEN RECOLLECTING MEMORIES
(summary and expectations)
Conference participants found the following topics important and just touched upon during the workshops in the first two days:
- Importance of women’s memories.
- Their unjustified marginalization and suppression from official history and collective memory.
- Entwinement and two-way influence of political events to concrete women’s destinies and vice-versa; (Through their own story women participate in, and influence, occurrences in the region to the same extent to which those occurrences influence their lives).
- Cross-border cooperation and feminist approach to psychosocial work with women victims of war violence, by which feminist women’s groups differentiated themselves from the work of other institutions.
Suggestions and expectations relating to preservation of women’s recollections and the inclusion of gender dimension of memory into public memory:
- Creation of a web site dedicated to women’s recollections of the era of transition and wars in the former Yugoslav countries.
- Activists writing their autobiographies.
- Seminars on way and methodology in researching women’s recollections.
- Gathering regional stories and experiences from different surroundings.
- Writing about experiences of nationalism in one’s own surrounding (from family, city to the state).
- Gathering and exhibiting photographs and films as visual forms of recollection.
- Founding a "virtual museum" of history of the region (as an open, interactive space for discussion and research).
- Systematic recording of the influence of women’s groups to the system itself, establishing of civil society, and the like.
- Linking transitional/wartime experiences of women from the region with women from other parts of the world who have similar experiences – from Eastern European countries to countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America.
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These pages are dedicated to women’s memories of resistance to war and nationalisms in the countries of former Yugoslavia, but also to the activities of all women in the world who, in the context of transitional processes, raise their voice against war violence and discrimination.
