The Feminist Politics of Secular Redemption at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

The Tribunal

In the history of humanitarian and human rights law that includes European imperial lawmaking and the post–World War II declarations of universal human rights, the ICTY marks the advent of juridical and institutional technologies underlying postsocialist imperialism. A counterpart to the humanitarian military violence discussed in previous chapters, the ICTY and other international tribunals use human rights and humanitarian law as modes of geopolitical governance that bring rogue nations and their inhabitants into the fold of postsocialist humanity. Like modern law in the colonial era, the expansive interpretation of humanitarian and human rights law establishes a temporal narrative in which not only individuals but nations and regions leave the past and become human in different historical moments (and at different rates).5 Unlike colonial law, which bound its subjects to the authority of the state, international humanitarian law—institutionalized in courts of law whose authority some nations are obliged to recognize in order to receive international loans and aid, while others are not—establishes the new human rights regime as a way of acting on and enacting unequal sovereignties in the name of producing a common humanity.

A locus of juridical humanization for the non-Western world, the Tribunal recenters Euro-American procedural and moral norms of justice even as it claims to be mindful of cultural and contextual differences (particularly those of gender, race, and religion). Established as a court of law in The Hague, the Netherlands, by a United Nations Security Council mandate in 1993, the ICTY was the first war crimes court in existence since the Nuremberg and Tokyo post–World War II tribunals. With the Security Council’s Resolution 827, the ICTY was formed “for the sole purpose of prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.”6 During the debates on Resolution 827, it became clear that the ICTY would be conceived of as a different kind of tribunal, with the goal of engendering a new and more robust international concept of justice than did the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials. The formation of the Tribunal prior to the conclusion of the wars over which the ICTY was to have primary jurisdiction framed the role of the United Nations, led by the Western European and U.S. nations, as that of chronicler of war crimes as they were occurring. Unlike the contained postwar trials of Nuremberg, which lasted from 1945 to 1949, and Tokyo, which took place from 1946 to 1948, the ICTY has been trying war criminals continuously from 1993 through the present.7 In further contrast to the post–World War II tribunals, the ICTY’s mandate is not to single out nations or ethnic or religious groups for punishment but, rather, to try those individuals accused of perpetrating crimes of war and crimes against humanity.8 In this connection, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright stated, “This will be no victor’s tribunal. The only victor that will prevail in this endeavor is the truth.”9 As evidence of fulfilling this primary mission, the ICTY is careful to point out that although the largest number of the accused are Serbs, “the Tribunal has investigated and brought charges against persons from every ethnic background.”10 Thus its principles and purpose are envisioned as having a more universal scope that will permanently influence the postsocialist geopolitical landscape.

The ICTY is explicit about being an activist institution, citing its cases as evidence that “efficient and transparent international justice is viable,” and that it is possible to expand “the boundaries of international humanitarian and international criminal law, both in terms of substance and procedure.”11 Thus far “the Tribunal has indicted 161 [individuals] accused for crimes committed against . . . victims during the conflicts in Croatia (1991–1995), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), Kosovo (1998–1999) and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (2001).”12 Over four thousand witnesses have testified. The Tribunal operates three trial chambers and one appeals chamber; maintains the divisions of the Office of the President, the Office of the Prosecutor, and the Office of the Registrar (which manages the witnesses and the accused); and runs the detention center. Employing nearly nine hundred staff members, the ICTY’s operating budget has exceeded $200,000,000 each year since 2002, reaching $342,332,300 in 2008–2009.13 As a long-standing and well-funded institutional fixture on the landscape of international justice in the postsocialist era, the ICTY is considered a model for other tribunals and international institutions of law, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), founded in 1994, and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 2002 through the ratification of the Rome Statute UN Treaty.14

The institutionalization of juridical activism in the development of an international human rights regime, of which the growth and importance of the ICTY is an example and a constitutive component, has largely been lauded as an actualization of a global humanitarian ethics. However, the growth of human rights as a framework outside of which it is increasingly difficult to conceptualize justice and transnational activism is a historically and culturally particular occurrence enabled by the demise of communism. First, in the geopolitical sense, the landscape of international relations has drastically changed since 1989. According to Rachel Kerr, the founding of the ICTY was made possible by an unprecedented “convergence of legal, political and diplomatic circumstances.”15 With the mandate to create the ICTY following the 1992 report on the war filed by the Commission of Experts, the UN Security Council expanded the previous Cold War–era understanding of the kinds of events and occurrences that constitute threats to peace and security in order to include intrastate as well as interstate conflicts. Kerr explains that this rearrangement of power was critical to the evolution of international humanitarian and international criminal law, leading to the transformation in the interpretation of the Security Council’s authority that allowed for a juridical institution to be created through a political mandate.16 Second, and more significant, the demise of communism has led to a narrowing of the range of visions of justice, particularly those that differ from the liberal democratic conception of juridical procedure and individual and minority rights.

For inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia, who had until 1990 lived under a system of socialist self-governance, the sort of justice resulting from the rulings of the ICTY has been perceived as limited. On the one hand, the emphasis on transparency and truth as the foundations for justice in the Tribunal tends to be opposed to the Communist regime’s procedural obscurity and concealment. On the other hand, the legal reforms that have ushered in the postsocialist era (nationally and transnationally) have also been accompanied by neoliberal economic restructurings. These have exacerbated postwar poverty and inequality in much of the former Yugoslavia, which had been a relatively wealthy nation during the Cold War. Thus, as Isabelle Delpha shows, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the achievements of the ICTY are viewed as distant and having little effect on day-to-day material hardships.17 In this sense, the juridical and institutional framework obscures the possibility of economic and social welfare as an equal, if not a more important, site through which injustice and indignity can be apprehended on a global scale. The ICTY’s parameters for determining guilt in the former Yugoslavia have also brought to the forefront the problem of unequal sovereignties.18 Many Bosnians thus feel that the ICTY establishes a new hierarchy of humanity, distinct from the dehumanization of war, and that, as the ones being judged, the citizens of the former Yugoslavia have fallen in the rankings of that hierarchy since the demise of state socialism.19

The friction between distinct visions of justice suggests a need to investigate the Tribunal as a postsocialist mode of governance that uses and produces ex-Yugoslavia as a forensic and experimental field through which a postsocialist humanity born of the new international regime of human rights is normalized. In this broader sense, the work of the Tribunal far exceeds its stated mission of “bringing war criminals to justice, [and] bringing justice to victims.” Rather, the Tribunal should be thought of as an institution, and as a culture, that displaces previous (socialist) modes of organizing nation and society. In the nations of the former Yugoslavia, these include, for instance, the principles of “brotherhood and unity” (bratsvo i jedinstvo), an anti-Fascist Partisan slogan from World War II under which the peoples of the former Yugoslavia united, and which became official policy on interethnic antinationalism in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and workers’ self-management (radničko samoupravljanje), a form of workplace decision making directed by workers themselves, pioneered in the former Yugoslavia after Tito’s split with the Soviet Union. As socialist ideals are replaced by aspirations for European accession, economic liberalization, and human rights, inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia become postsocialist human beings, governed by the international rule of law.

As part of making new global subjects, the ICTY has been given the authority to confer humanity anew to the Balkans by producing an authoritative historical account of wartime atrocity as a way of reconciling former enemies. Numerous scholars have noted that the work of the ICTY has fundamentally altered the relationship between law and history in unprecedented ways.20 According to the ICTY website, “The Tribunal has contributed to an indisputable historical record, combating denial and helping communities come to terms with their recent history. Crimes across the region can no longer be denied. For example, it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that the mass murder at Srebrenica was genocide.”21 Indisputably, the work of accounting and accountability for the crimes of rape, mass murder, and genocide is crucial. However, considering the ICTY’s primacy of jurisdiction over the former Yugoslavia, the mandate to produce a single historical narrative indicates that the expansion of international humanitarian and criminal law entails the engineering of individual and collective identities that can take shape only after contradictory and alternate accounts of the past are silenced. Central to the broader project of redeeming the Balkans from their recent inhuman acts, the singular historical narrative places the ICTY as a redemptive end point to the barbarous past. Through the workings of the Tribunal, the peoples of the former Yugoslavia enter the singular narrative of historical progress and are enfolded into universal (Euro-American) humanity. As the ICTY becomes the institutional seat of international juridical power in which Yugoslav barbarism, ethnic separatism, and violence are recounted and recorded as the historical record through the court archives and on the Internet, each recitation and record of inhumanity becomes the condition of possibility for rehumanizing the region through human rights law.

A “New Feminist Consciousness” of Juridical Redemption

The legislative activity of the ICTY over the last two decades, as well as its mission to produce a singular historical account of the wars, has dovetailed, overlapped, and been framed by liberal multiculturalist and feminist epistemologies and notions of progress. The Tribunal’s decision to try rape as a crime against humanity for the first time has not just made new meaning of wartime sexual violence against women. More significantly, sexual violence against women has become foundational to the emergent political project of making women’s human rights a normative postsocialist technology of moral governance. The hypervisibility of sexual injury in the new human rights culture is based on an evolutionary narrative of humanization, which leads to Euro-American liberal notions of difference and inclusion. After the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought an end to the violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, feminist writing and activism surrounding the issue of rape warfare provided the groundwork that shaped, on an international scale, the mechanisms of international law mobilized on behalf of women’s human rights. More than the other international courts and tribunals, the ICTY has become the locus in which the “new feminist consciousness” articulated its ambitions.22

From the start of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, U.S. and European feminists took up the issue of rape warfare as a foremost global feminist cause. Several prominent American feminists classified the violence in the former Yugoslavia as the first gendered genocide. In a 1993 opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times, Anna Quindlen called the war in Bosnia a “gynocide,” while Catharine MacKinnon, that same year, argued in Ms. magazine that the rapes against the Bosnian women were a “postmodern genocide.”23 Reports of rape camps, which were sometimes affiliated with detention and exchange camps, and at other times devoted entirely to the captivity of women, came as shocking news. As in other wars, large numbers of women suffered rape or sexual assault during the Yugoslav wars—by some estimates, between twenty thousand and sixty thousand—and many of the rapes resulted in unwanted pregnancies.24 While all of the warring parties claimed that women of their nationality were raped, Serbian soldiers committed the greatest number of rapes against Bosnian Muslim women. At the conclusion of the war, feminist investment in Bosnia was transferred to the ICTY as the institutional site that could restore the dignity of violated women and make it clear in future wars that crimes against women were war crimes.25 As Beverly Allen wrote in the conclusion to her book Rape Warfare, if Walter Benjamin’s angel could peer into and shape the postsocialist future, “it may well be through legal or juridical actions taken in regard to military aggression and war crimes.”26

For Allen, as for other feminist scholars, the end of the Cold War led to an unprecedented opportunity to mold the institutionalization of global women’s human rights.27 In this respect, it is notable that feminists who are well known in U.S. women’s rights struggles took up the issue of rape in Bosnia as the transnationalization of the issues they had fought over domestically in the 1970s and 1980s. Cynthia Enloe’s afterword to Mass Rape, the most cited book on the wartime rapes in Bosnia, makes this quite explicit. She writes, “The very horror of the post–Cold War war in Bosnia has put rape on the international agenda.”28 Enloe suggests that “by the time Croatians, Serbs, and Bosnians were at war, there had been two decades of feminist work on rape.”29 Citing the history of antirape activism in North America and Western Europe dating back to the 1970s, Enloe proposes that these veteran activists were well prepared to take their struggle from the national courtroom to an international one. She outlines a transnational politics of hope modeled on the U.S. feminist progress narrative, which has led to the international-mindedness of Euro-American feminist publications, and she posits that the critique of Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism headed by Third World and women of color feminists, having made headway in these nations, produced a novel connection among women that is mindful of cultural and local differences. She writes, “These magazines [Ms., Off Our Backs, and Everywoman] had become much more internationally minded by the early 1990s, thanks in large part to Third World feminists’ 1980s critiques of European and North American feminists’ parochialism. So it was not mere coincidence that Croatian feminist groups existed at the outbreak of the war and that they had personal contacts with the editors of Ms.”30 In this regard, Enloe views the efforts of Mass Rape as part of such a new transnational feminist network. Referring to Alexandra Stiglmayer, its editor, Enloe notes, “German feminists in the early 1990s perhaps have a special stake in figuring out just what it means for German women and Bosnian women to share ‘Europeanness.’”31

A “new feminist consciousness,” as Enloe puts it, was possible only when mainstream feminism, having undergone a racial and transnational self-critique, sought to shift the parameters of activism to reenter debates about universality. Fighting to expand the meaning of universal human rights through the rubric of women’s rights, feminists working on behalf of rape victims during the war saw the Tribunal as a continuation of their efforts. Indeed, in its two decades of trying war crimes, the ICTY counts its decisions on wartime sexual violence to be among its chief successes, and as such it connects developments in humanitarian law to the successes of Euro-American feminism.32 According to the ICTY website, “Almost half of those convicted by the ICTY have been found guilty of elements of crimes involving sexual violence. Such convictions are one of the Tribunal’s pioneering achievements. They have ensured that treaties and conventions which have existed on paper throughout the 20th century have finally been put in practice, and violations punished.”33 As Patricia Sellers, a prosecution trial attorney and an adviser on issues of gender at the ICTY, noted about the prosecution of wartime sexual violence, “There has been more jurisprudence out of our Tribunal in five years than in the past five hundred years of international criminal courts.”34 For instance, Rule 96 of the Tribunal, enacted in 1994, was considered groundbreaking in facilitating the prosecution of rape. With the rule, victims’ testimony requires no corroboration; consent is not an admissible defense, especially if women are subjected to threats or have reason to fear for their own or others’ safety; and, finally, prior sexual conduct of the victim is not admissible into evidence.35

In addition to procedural developments, the ICTY’s rulings provide crucial legal precedents for future courts dealing with cases of rape and sexual violence. In the ICTY’s first major decision focusing exclusively on crimes involving sexual violence in 2001, Zoran Vuković, Radomir Kovač, and Dragoljub Kunarac, three Bosnian Serb soldiers, were convicted of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war. While a previous ruling by the Rwanda Tribunal was groundbreaking in its decision that rape could constitute a form of genocide, the 2001 ICTY ruling extended jurisprudence on sexual violence by deciding that sexual enslavement was a crime against humanity:

“What the evidence shows,” said presiding judge Florence Mumba in a statement read in court, “are Muslim women and girls, mothers and daughters together, robbed of their last vestiges of human dignity. Women and girls, treated like chattels, pieces of property at the arbitrary disposal of the Serb occupation forces, and more specifically at the beck and call of the three accused.”36

Sellers, elaborating on the significance of the ruling, explained that “for the first time since Nuremberg, [the Foča case] gave us modern jurisprudence under humanitarian law as to what enslavement meant—a person owning sexual access to a victim—which is very important in terms of the legal concept. . . . Enslavement wasn’t dependent on being locked in a cell or working in a field with a ball and chains.”37 She also emphasized the universal import of these rulings, clarifying that “gender crimes” were not crimes against women but against “sexual integrity.”38

Certainly, as some scholars have noted, it is dangerous to equate advances in jurisprudence with justice. Sara Sharratt, for instance, worries that the rulings only produce women as vulnerable, while portraying male victims as courageous survivors.39 Wendy Hesford similarly warns that the ICTY and “legal remedies may inadvertently perpetuate the most powerful icon in the violent production of gendered identities—the spectacle of female victimization.”40 At the same time, there can be no doubt that the ICTY rulings signal an unprecedented merging of feminist and juridical notions of global progress. In this connection, Debra Berghoffen argues that the Tribunal has permanently changed the landscape of international human rights law and, more importantly, notions of humanity.41 She proposes that with the creation of a new human right—the right to sexual self-determination—the ICTY validated the dignity of the vulnerable human body.42 Because the ICTY identified rape as a crime against humanity and not a crime against women, the argument goes, following the 2001 ruling it is no longer possible to think of human rights offenses as an assault on the integrity of an imaginary invulnerable (male) body but, rather, as an attack against the “humanity of our embodied vulnerability.”43 The transformation of sexuality as a mark of human dignity thus demonstrates that vulnerability pervades all aspects of human life and, more importantly, it resignifies vulnerability from that of a feminine condition to that of a universal human condition.44 Though she rejects the feminist and juridical developmental narrative espoused by the ICTY itself, Berghoffen nonetheless collapses the promise of the vulnerable body and the messianic promise of human rights. Thus while she distinguishes the notion of rights as the engine of the enlightenment from that of rights as a moral response to shared horror, she insists that it is necessary to keep faith in the present and future promise of juridical technologies as the defining essence of our common humanity.

The Secularization of Bosnian Muslim Women

In spite of the fact that the overrepresentation of the raped and violated Bosnian Muslim woman spurred an articulation of a postsocialist, global feminist consciousness capable of laying claims to the universality within the realm of human rights, feminist faith in the possibility of juridical redemption necessitated the secularization of the war’s victims. Bosnian Muslims were portrayed as a religious group singled out for persecution within the former Yugoslavia, but Bosnian Islam was not viewed as a religion dictating a worldview distinct from that of secular modern notions of power, governance, and justice. Since Bosnian Muslims’ religious subjectivity could not be the foundational difference around which the liberal progress narrative of Euro-American feminist consciousness was to develop, sexual vulnerability took its place as the foremost marker of Bosnian war crimes. For example, in MacKinnon’s infamous article, “Turning Rape into Pornography,” which prompted subsequent feminist interest in the Bosnian war, religion is reduced to a “cultural marker,” which, like race and ethnicity but unlike sex, is not legible on Balkan bodies.45 Although the Muslim woman was the hypervisible raped victim of war, as an unraced and secularized woman, she was able to stand for a universalized victim (woman) without particular religious or ethnic attachments.

In subsequent writings about Bosnia and the wars in Yugoslavia, MacKinnon makes the case explicitly that liberal notions of rights based on differences that can be accommodated within secular societies should be the foundation of a new international juridical order, modeled on U.S. and Canadian law. She writes, “In the received international human rights tradition, . . . equality has been more abstract than concrete, more transcendent than secular, more descended from natural law than admittedly socially based.”46 MacKinnon faults existing international human rights law for disregarding human difference and idealizing transcendence. Thus far, she argues, either women have been reduced to their gendered particularity, and therefore have not embodied universal humanity, or, when they have been included as victims in the realm of universality, their particularity as women has been erased. In contrast, a secular human rights regime would generate new principles “best approximated in North American equality law, pioneered by the Black civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and the women’s movement in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s.”47 The tenets of a global women’s movement and civil rights movement, according to MacKinnon, produce “a rich concept of equality not as sameness but as lack of hierarchy. . . . The movement provides a principled basis for sex equality as a human right.”48

That MacKinnon explains the key distinction between a secular and a transcendent notion of human rights through North American models of “diversity” and “equality” grounded in the principles of civil rights speaks to the merging of U.S. racial and gender formations in law and culture and transnational regimes of justice and redemption in the contemporary world. Her formulation elucidates the particular representational modes through which Bosnian Muslim women were made to emblematize the need to shift and develop international human rights law in the postsocialist era. Secular differences are those differences that still enable the subject to place her faith in civil, liberal rights as the path to human equality and emancipation (and, therefore, what MacKinnon calls “relative universality”). Thus secular difference, such as culture, ethnicity, or sex, permits the subject of the postsocialist human rights regime to be folded into the story that MacKinnon and others tell of the global women’s rights movement as leading, finally, to the recognition of gendered humanity as the new universal.

The meaning and value attached to secularism within Western Europe and the United States exceed the commonplace understanding of the concept of the secular as the separation of church and state. As an ideal for organizing religious belief in the modern world, secularism shapes the very notions of liberal democracy, tolerance, and fair governance, and as such it was crucial in conceptions of the proper development of the formerly socialist nations after 1990. The insistence on Bosnian Muslim women’s secularism was essential to their ability to stand for feminist progress, facilitating the collusion between mainstream Euro-American feminism and humanitarian imperialism in the 1990s, and subsequent militarism in the post-9/11 era. Tracy Fessenden argues that whereas “an academic critique of the use of women as the marker of an imperial vision of civilization is now well established, this vision’s reliance on a progress narrative of secularization has gone largely unremarked.”49 Historically, the “association between secularism and freedom . . . confers a special moral standing on those who share both secularism and its particular Protestant genealogy [of freedom of conscience], fueling imperial projects from nineteenth-century colonialism to contemporary international interventions.”50 For Fessenden, “special moral standing is frequently given in appeals to the treatment of women,” and consequently, the “historical articulations between women’s rights and U.S. imperialism are clearest in the realm of religion,” even as the feminist progress narrative obscures this connection through its claims to secularism (liberating women from religious oppression).51 That Bosnian Muslim women did not need to be liberated from religious oppression, supposedly unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, fit with the claims of postsocialist imperialism as embracing diversity, as long as particular markers and modes of inhabiting difference could be accommodated within the liberal rule of law.

Of course, as a Muslim majority nation, Bosnia embodies the legacy of the Ottoman Empire on the European continent.52 In this sense, the nation fits uncomfortably into notions of the properly European. According to Talal Asad, within the conception of Europe envisaged as not simply a continent but a civilization, Muslims are uniquely at once included and excluded within a mythology dependent on “notions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ and ‘the secular state,’ ‘majority,’ and ‘minority.’”53 In his consideration of the shifting borders of postsocialist Europe, therefore, Asad proposes that “where European borders are to be drawn is also a matter of representing what European civilization is. . . . They reflect a history whose unconfused purpose is to separate Europe from alien times (‘communism,’ ‘Islam’) as well as from alien places (‘Islamdom,’ ‘Russia’).”54 As European borders shift, even while the idea of Europe is reaffirmed, “the ‘inside’ cannot contain the ‘outside,’ violent cultures cannot inhabit a civil one—Europe cannot contain non-Europe. . . . And yet Europe must try to contain, subdue, or incorporate what lies beyond it, and what consequently comes to be within it.”55 It is not surprising, therefore, that the postsocialist temporality of social and economic transition, as well as of crisis, from the Bosnian war to the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, has produced Muslim populations as the “problem” through which the borders and parameters of inclusion into the “free world” and new geopolitical divisions are determined. Building on existing literatures about the “problem” that Muslims represent for notions of Euro-American civilization and modernity, a number of scholars have noted that in commentaries on the Bosnian war, Bosnian Muslims were recognized either as European, and therefore not really thought of as Muslim, or, in cases where Bosnian Islam was seen as a nonsecular manifestation of faith, or as not really European.56 Tone Bringa, for instance, argues that Bosnian Islam is either perceived as a remnant of the Ottoman past apart from European modernity or analyzed through the trope of Islamic fundamentalism threatening to encroach on Western Europe. Critical of both strands of reductive reasoning, Bringa urges a reconsideration of Islam in Bosnia that would emphasize Ottoman policies of religious tolerance. Because Bosnian Muslims challenge the “very ideas of Europe as a Christian entity,” Bringa suggests that they can become a model for a new mode of religious open-mindedness on the Continent.57

Bringa’s astute analysis of Europe’s ambivalent relationship to Bosnian Islam, though incisive in its critique of the dual and contradictory mechanisms of exclusion, nonetheless misses the moments of inclusion and incorporation through which the United States and Europe rearticulate their own universality and progress. Bosnian prewar multiculturalism was in fact largely seen as a purview of Bosnian Muslims, since the Serbs were thought to have destroyed multiethnic coexistence and Bosnian cosmopolitanism in their genocidal quest for a “greater Serbia” cleansed of all Muslims and Croats. As such, in most wartime analyses, Bosnian Muslims became the bearers of any possible multiethnic and tolerant future in the region. The fact that Europe and the United States acknowledged and, indeed, foregrounded that the war’s victims were Muslim was significant, showcasing the Western nations’ commitment to religious freedom through their support of a non-Christian population. It was also imperative that Bosnian Muslims be portrayed as a secular people, whose values were aligned with the Western world in the sense that they did not let religion influence their commitment to liberal modes of governance. Keeping in mind that the breakup of the former Yugoslavia was not about ancient ethnic hatreds as described by the Euro-American media, but about the dissolution of socialist self-governance and the reorganization of the economy, society, and everyday life, the insistence on Bosnian Muslim secularism on the part of Western commentators and activists seemed to imply that they were already properly liberal subjects in contrast to the groups that were vilified during the conflict.58 For example, ranking the extent to which antisecularism led to separatist nationalism and violence in the former Yugoslavia, Michael Sells proposes that unlike the mobilization of Serbian Orthodoxy, Bosnian Muslims “never achieved (or resorted to) a religious nationalist identity of any widespread acceptance.”59 Indeed, Sells emphasizes that any Islamic nationalism in Bosnia was not indigenous to the region but “imposed from the outside.”60 Only after the destructive power of Serbian “militant religious mythology” became evident did the Bosnian Muslims become vulnerable to the financial and religious influence of Saudi Islam, an implicitly nonsecular, militant mode of Islam in his line of argument.61

Throughout the 1990s, U.S. and European engagement with the Bosnian war resolved the contradiction between portraits of Bosnian Muslims as victims of Christian aggression and the collective Euro-American fantasy of dislodging Islam from the boundaries of New Europe through accounts that spotlighted Bosnian Islam’s commitment to liberal multicultural values and religious tolerance. The seeming recognition of Bosnian Muslims as tentatively European, at least during the war years and, subsequently, within the ICTY, delinked the continued insistence that Muslim inhabitants living in Western nations were non-European (both in terms of geography and in terms of belief systems) from the critique that Europe itself was incapable of universality. Bosnian Muslims became the proof of Europe’s capacity for religious diversity. Indeed, Europe was portrayed as the location of hope for Bosnian Muslims in the face of Balkan ethnoreligious “cleansing.” It is not surprising, then, that most feminists writing about the plight of Bosnian Muslim women took pains to imagine the population as secular and, in this sense, already European in their outlook and way of inhabiting religious identity, confined to the private sphere. This was done through the ethnicization and culturalization of Bosnian Islam.62 The idea that Bosnian Muslims were an ethnic minority sharing a cultural identity more so than a community of faith enabled Bosnian Muslims to be viewed as governable within and emblematic of the values espoused by the emergent human rights regime.

Throughout the Bosnian war, stories about prewar society drew attention to the fact that people lived side by side before the war. Commentators noted that Sarajevo was much more diverse than most cities in the United States and the West.63 In her book on seeking justice after the war, one reporter who had been present during the violence explained how people in Sarajevo could still recall getting along. She describes how Bosnians remember the past: “See, we all got along, Muslim, Croat, Serb. . . . Our town had a mosque, but it also had an orthodox cathedral; we weren’t religious, but we’d feast to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Bayram or the Serb holiday of Petrovdan; everyone went to Christmas Eve mass at the cathedral.”64 In this reporter’s scenario of Bosnia’s multicultural past, the mosques, churches, and religious holidays are depicted as just cultural symbols—manifestations not of faith but of ethnocultural diversity. In other words, they are signs that in the Balkans, the U.S. subject can recognize a secular topography of religious difference with which she can identify.

The discourse about Bosnian multicultural cosmopolitanism and of Bosnian Muslims as exemplifying the secular, cultural diversity that was uniquely Euro-American had a strong impact on feminist scholarship. Bosnian Muslim women were distinguished from the predominant stereotype of non-European Muslims as fundamentalist and misogynist. Former U.S. ambassador to Austria Swanee Hunt, who became interested in the Bosnian war during her time in Europe and continued working with a number of women’s nongovernmental organizations in Bosnia after the war, published This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Making the Peace, a collection of interviews with Bosnian women. Hunt describes her informants as follows: “There is no dramatic Islamic tale to tell; few women in Bosnia look, act, or speak in some particularly Muslim way. They do not quote the Koran, nor do they see their choices limited by Islamic teaching. . . . Bosnian Muslim women are for the most part assimilated in a secularized society in which Islamic heritage provides traditions and values, but not dogma.”65 One of the women Hunt interviewed, Alma, is quoted as stating, “A Muslim woman—by religious rules—should be only a homemaker. But Bosnian women work. It’s not like Algeria or some other place where they’re fighting for basic rights. We should help the women of Kabul. Bosniak women are an inspiration for women all over the world.”66 In this interview excerpt, which frames an entire chapter as its epigraph, Bosnian women’s universality (their “inspiration” for “the world”) occurs only through their distancing from other non-European Muslim women. This is not to say that Hunt imagines Bosnians as non-Muslims. Rather, for Hunt, the women of Bosnia provide an occasion to spotlight the voices of “those who can distinguish between religion as a path to life and religion as a pretext for killing.”67 Religion, as the path to “life,” involves an emphasis on traditions and values in the realm of the home and family rather than an association between piety and statecraft. Put otherwise, it is a secular conception of religion in the private sphere that offers a path to life after war.

Similarly, Beverly Allen’s work on rape warfare makes the case for Bosnian women’s secularism as a way to imagine Euro-American commitment to religious tolerance. In response to those scholars of rape warfare who “demonized” Muslim communities in Bosnia for maintaining patriarchal structures by ostracizing women who had been victims of wartime rapes, Allen writes that they “might be confusing racist clichés of Middle Eastern Arabs with the southern Slav heirs to the Bogomils,” a pacifist sect of Christianity.68 Though critical of “racist clichés” of Muslims, by distinguishing Bosnian Muslim women from their Middle Eastern counterparts, Allen herself racializes religious difference and replicates racist clichés. For Allen, Bosnian difference from the Middle East rests chiefly on their Slavic heritage. Descriptions of Bosnian Muslim women’s whiteness that signifies their Europeanness are not new. For instance, in her renowned book from the 1930s, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West wrote that among the Muslim Slavs of Sarajevo, she observed a veiled woman dressed in lilac silk, and then, catching a glimpse behind the veil, she saw a face “‘completely un-Oriental, as luminously fair as any Scandinavian.’”69 What is new in the postsocialist period is the association between the whiteness and the secularism of the Muslim women.

When Islamic fundamentalism or an antisecular tendency in Bosnia is addressed in Euro-American feminist scholarship, often it is in the context of laying blame for the moral failure of the Western nations to live up to their own secular commitment to religious tolerance by intervening in the conflict. In her research following up on This Was Not Our War, Swanee Hunt returned to Bosnia, where she found a nation increasingly turning to the Middle East. In her second book, Worlds Apart, Hunt proclaims that nonintervention by the United States leads to women on the streets veiling themselves.70 Although, she argues, Bosnian Islam is about multiethnic tolerance and against veiling, when Iran funds cultural centers in the region, while the United States offers no aid for infrastructural rebuilding, fundamentalist values will win out.71 In this perspective, because of U.S. and European shortcomings, the Bosnian way of being Muslim, that is, the secular, multiethnic, and tolerant way, came under danger from ultrareligious Serb nationalists and, later, Iranian and Saudi Muslim organizations. Western intervention, implicitly, would work to preserve secularism and diversity against the forces of the Middle East. In short, the United States and the West should see themselves as having a stake in the struggle between two ways of being Muslim. For Hunt, therefore, the blanket distrust of all of Islam becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which fundamentalism does indeed spread.72 This lesson is also a feminist one. Had the women been in charge, she argues, the war would not have happened.73 As evidence, she describes how women put on lipstick during the siege to get jugs of water. After the war, rather than delivering tractors, Hunt thus chooses to deliver tubes of lipstick to Bosnian women. As a ritual and recognition of universal womanhood, this exchange became for her the condition of possibility for local and global reconciliation, tolerance, and rebuilding.

That the Bosnian war became a feminist cause on a global scale, contributing to a feminization of peace and humanitarian action and a masculinization of war and violence, helps explain the gendered distinction that structured some Euro-American portrayals of Bosnian Muslims. Though Bosnian Muslim men were seen as victims of Serbian violence, they nonetheless were at times vilified with respect to Muslim women.74 Ruth Seifert, for instance, suggests that the way to explain why Serbs raped Muslim women, while Muslim men did not rape Serbian women, is that societies with a low incidence of rape are the ones in which “male supremacy is completely assured (an example would be most Muslim societies).”75 Seifert, while reproducing the commonplace association between Muslim societies and rigid patriarchal structures, reinterprets the charge of traditionalism here to accommodate, and complete, the picture of Bosnian Muslim victimhood in this war. Thus, in spite of the charge that Muslim traditionalism and collective “shame” surrounding the issue of rape made stories and testimonies difficult to find, the accusation actually frames the testimony of those Muslim women willing to share their story as all the more important to the emergence of a new global feminist ethics and justice.76 This new ethical vision produced the Euro-American woman (which could include Bosnian Muslim women) as the ideal multicultural and secular subject who breaks through the walls of patriarchy in her own society domestically as well as internationally.

Sacred Life, Common Humanity, and the Juridical Politics of Faith

The secularization of Bosnian Muslims during and after the war in Bosnia became the condition of possibility for the consolidation of a new global regime of humanitarian and human rights law—the mechanism for human salvation following the Dayton Accords.77 The operations of the perpetual Tribunal, having coalesced with the project of postsocialist feminism, call on both the victims and the accused in the former Yugoslavia to place their faith not in religious narratives of deliverance but, rather, in the possibility of juridical redemption of their humanity. As Asad argues, human rights law can be thought of as “a mode of converting and regulating people, making them at once freer and more governable in this world.”78 Through simultaneous emphasis on procedural “transparency” and historical “truth” as determined through forensic investigation, including the exhumation of mass graves, statements of victimhood and guilt, records of the hearings and testimonies, and documentary-style media outputs, the culture of international humanitarian law increasingly monopolizes notions of justice. Creating a singular narrative of common humanity based in secular multicultural and feminist values, the Tribunal forces inhabitants of those regions marked by atrocity to declare their belief in its principles and procedures if they are to regain the world’s recognition as properly human once again.

The ICTY website, which is organized as a public record of the Tribunal’s chief accomplishments, simultaneously stages the spectacle of victims’ violation and the condemnation and conversion of the guilty to demonstrate how a court of law can create a new social world in the Balkans. The Tribunal’s digital archive prominently features excerpts from testimonies, categorized as “Statements of Guilt” and “Voice of the Victims.” Both sets of narratives affirm the Tribunal as the locus where past atrocity can be overcome, and where former enemies embrace feminist, multicultural, and secular values. A statement taken from the testimony of Teufika Ibrahimefendić, a witness called before the court in 2000, encapsulates these goals: “All the victims . . . trust . . . that the people will muster enough courage, including victims, to tell the story of what happened. Those who did it, that they too will be able to speak out so that we all can have a basis for a common life together one day.”79 The “Voice of the Victims” page details the conditions of inhumanity through which international humanitarian law is acknowledged as a precondition for the future protection of human life as sacred. Within the historical narrative produced by the ICTY, the vulnerability of the victims’ bodies takes precedence over particular bodies’ ethnic, national, or religious affiliations. Victims of all ethnic groups thus become evidence of the Tribunal’s project of sanctifying liberal notions of common humanity.

On the “Voice of the Victims” page, individuals tell their stories about how their lives will never be fully restored because of the extent of the horrors they have experienced, recounting their wartime torment and dehumanization as proclamations of psychic and social death. Witness DD, testifying with her name and identity withheld from the public, like a number of other victims, described the losses she suffered during the July 1995 genocide of Srebrenica, in which her husband and sons were killed. Next to her image, which is blocked out, a quote from her testimony reads, “This youngest boy I had, those little hands of his, how could they be dead? Every morning I wake up I cover my eyes not to look at other children going to school.”80 While Witness DD survived the Srebrenica genocide, her words imply that though she is alive, her life has not gone on, and that she does not wish to take part in the life that goes on around her (she shuts her eyes), as she states, “and then sometimes I also think it would be better if none of us had survived. I would prefer it.” Many of the victims’ quotes, excerpted from their testimonies on the “Voice of the Victims” page, echo Witness DD’s sentiments—that survivors are simply bodies emptied of their former lives. Habiba Hadžić, a Bosnian Muslim woman raped at the Serb-run Sušica camp, states, “I am a sick woman now. . . . I have nothing to hope for. . . . I would just like to ask . . . where they are. . . . I want to give them a proper burial . . . then I can go away myself.”81 The excerpt from Grozdana Ćećez, a Serbian woman raped at a detention camp in Bosnia, states, “He trampled on my pride and I will never be able to be the woman that I was.”82

In spite of the testimonial declarations positioning the victims as the living detritus of the war, their words and physical presence at The Hague give life to the Tribunal. The victims’ voices and scarred bodies and souls bear the traces of the horrific past, a reminder that the world needs the Tribunal as a humanizing mechanism to counteract the dehumanization of the detention, rape, and death camp. The “Voice of the Victims” page demonstrates the inextricable relationship between the spectacle of suffering and the rise of the global human rights paradigm in contemporary geopolitics. According to Wendy Brown, human rights activism

generally presents itself as . . . a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals. More precisely, human rights take their shape as a moral discourse centered on pain and suffering rather than political discourse of comprehensive justice.83

While the ICTY continues to emphasize the suffering and pain of innocent victims of illiberal regimes, marked by practices of ethnic cleansing, tribalism, and patriarchy, its difference from human rights activism at large is that it has the institutional authority to create new modes of governance out of (and in response to) individual accounts of atrocity. As the official space in which individual “voices of victims” become part of a singular, authoritative historical account, the Tribunal turns testimonies of pain, suffering, and death into a collective global story of secular and juridical redemption through human rights. As the Tribunal home page notes, “Since its establishment in 1993 [the ICTY] has irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law and provided victims an opportunity to voice the horrors they witnessed and experienced.”84 Framing victims’ testimony as an “opportunity to voice the horrors” constructs the Tribunal as a therapeutic space and, therefore, a transformative institution. Yet the transformation that the witnesses undergo is not individualized. Rather, it is portrayed as part of a broader transformation of justice on a global landscape, the “landscape of international humanitarian law.” Though the court cannot return psychic, social, or physical well-being to the victims, it can assign guilt for wrongdoing, remove guilty individuals from their societies, and institute the rule of liberal law in formerly despotic locales. On the ICTY website, next to the testimony of each victim is a summary of the prison sentence received by the guilty party—evidence of justice enacted by the Tribunal.

The ICTY’s reproduction of inhumanity through testimony and visual spectacle calls for an exploration of how devastated, degraded, and diminished lives are called on to sanction the institutionalization of a new human rights regime. The Tribunal, a permanent juridico-political feature of postsocialist governance that redraws the boundaries encompassing the landscapes of humanity, cannot exist without the camp (including the rape and death camps exposed by feminist activists). Indeed, the images and testimony of violated bodies (the victims) serve as proof that the Tribunal must continue to exist if there is to be any justice. In his theorization of the politicization of bare life as the “decisive event in modernity,” Giorgio Agamben addresses the intersections “between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power” through the body of homo sacer, the sacred man in Roman law, whose life cannot be sacrificed but who can be killed.85 To contextualize the contemporary understanding of life as sacred, in the sense that today life is invoked as a fundamental right in the face of power, Agamben emphasizes that the notion of sacred life originally expressed “precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment.”86 For Agamben, the camps that came to light during the wars in the former Yugoslavia should be thought of as exemplary of the contemporary, “more extreme form” of the biopolitical paradigm he describes.87 Referencing the feminist activist understanding of the rape in the camps as a tool of genocide, Agamben makes the case that “at issue in the former Yugoslavia is . . . an incurable rupture of the old nomos and a dislocation of populations and human lives along entirely new lines of flight.”88 At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben thus puts forth the figure of “the Bosnian woman at Omarska” camp, among others, as representative of the “perfect threshold of indistinction between biology and politics.”89 He writes:

The “body” is always already a biopolitical body and bare life. . . . In its extreme form, the biopolitical body of the West . . . appears as a threshold of absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological life. . . . Today a law that seeks to transform itself wholly into life is more and more confronted with a life that has been deadened and mortified into juridical rule.90

Extending Agamben’s analysis to conceive of the Tribunal and the camp as coconstitutive biopolitical spaces, through which the indistinctions between biology and politics, between law and fact, and between juridical rule and biological life become what Agamben calls the new “nomos of the planet,” the transfer of the body, reduced by the camp to bare life, from the rape, death, and detention camps to the Tribunal, can be thought of as a moment of sovereign reordering. The new order heralds a messianic temporality, which declares that life has become sacred through the actualization of international human rights. As the very same bodies that were once subject to the camp become subjects of the Tribunal, their status as bare life in the camp is precisely what continues to constitute them as relevant to the Tribunal. Indeed, inhabiting the zone between life and death endows these particular bodies with unique value for the Tribunal, where their lives are redeemed not as individual living bodies but as part of common humanity. The imprecise zone between life and death is further blurred as the dead and the living alike are made to declare the distinction between global conditions of inhumanity and humanity, and between the law of the camp and humanitarian law, as part of the process of arriving at juridical redemption. The transfer from the camp to the Tribunal is thus the occasion when the sacredness of human life is asserted in the arrival of the human rights regime as the moment of human redemption from previous regimes that declared their power by taking life.

To make meaning of these bodies in the juridico-political realm of international human rights governance, the Tribunal takes possession of the dead and living victims previously subject to now-defunct or discredited sovereign political regimes. Even as the human rights regime puts into crisis the power of the sovereign state to take life with impunity, declaring life to be sacred, through the work of its tribunals it also asserts its power over bodies, enacted through its power to own rather than to kill. As dead bodies, and survivors and witnesses, are collapsed into the category of “evidence” in war crimes trials, that evidence comes under the temporary ownership of the Tribunal, which has primacy over survivors’ desire to bury their dead. Bodies that become the property of the Tribunal are, in turn, given an afterlife as the foundation of postwar truth, healing, and humanitarian law. Clea Koff, a forensic anthropologist who worked on the unearthing and identification of bodies found in mass graves in Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, has chronicled the ambiguities inherent in the Tribunal’s process of restoring human dignity by taking possession of human remains as evidence. She writes:

My acute awareness of the Women of Srebrenica [an organization of widows and mothers] triggered the double vision. . . . I realized that the bodies belonged only temporarily to the Tribunal (as evidence of crimes against humanity), while they fundamentally belonged to the surviving relatives. In Rwanda, the double vision made me want to give remains back to relatives, regardless of protocol about bodies as Tribunal evidence. I even wanted to give the relatives just a bit of clothing, because their loss seemed so complete and was palpable to me.91

Koff’s description of her “double vision” is in fact a realization that when bodies and remains are treated as Tribunal property, it deepens the already profound loss felt by survivors. However, for Koff, this is a necessary, secondary loss for the broader project of restoring not individual humanity but common humanity. As she argues elsewhere in the book, “despite the facts—whether religious, ethnic, or historical—that are supposed to differentiate places like Rwanda and Kosovo, their dead reveal their common humanity, one that we all share.”92 If, within the context of the war’s production of bodies that could be killed and devastated with impunity, women’s and men’s bodies were reduced to their ethnicity, nationality, or religion, at the moment when the bodies became subjects of the Tribunal and the human rights regime in the postwar period, those same bodies, as Koff’s book suggests, take on the meaning of universal (common) humanity.93

Like the victims, whose violated bodies and diminished lives are evidence of the need for juridical affirmation of the sacredness of common humanity in the face of national, ethnic, and religious violence, the “Statements of Guilt” section featured on the ICTY website highlights the fact that the humanization of landscapes scarred by sectarian violence requires a commitment to liberal multicultural values. Through declarations of repentance in front of the court, former war criminals demonstrate their enlightenment as human beings, making the ICTY a theater of redemption upon whose stage public conversion occurs. The Tribunal provides an institutional platform for the guilty to voice their feelings of remorse and for war crime perpetrators to pronounce their submission to the rule of humanitarian law. Conversion narratives demonstrate that for the Balkans to reenter global humanity, their view of right and wrong must come into alignment with that of the human rights regime and the principles of tolerance. It is important that the idea of a common humanity in which the postsocialist world order places its faith is undergirded by a secular morality that the ICTY is seen to legislate and defend. Statements of repentance for actions undertaken during the war, and expressions of a desire for reconciliation, thus often articulate a longing for multiethnic and multireligious friendship to be enabled by the ICTY’s process of establishing an authoritative truth.

Stevan Todorović’s confession provides an example. His crimes are described in terms of his role as the “Police Chief and a member of the Bosnian Serb Crisis Staff in Bosanski Šamac, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992–1993. He persecuted non-Serb civilians on political, racial and religious grounds. Over a period of eight months, Todorović beat and tortured men, and ordered and participated in the interrogation of detained persons ordering them to sign false statements. He issued orders and directives that violated the rights of non-Serb civilians to equal treatment under the law.” In his statement of guilt, Todorović articulates his recognition that the principal cause of inhuman acts is ethnic and religious intolerance. Through his professed desire for reconciliation, he announces his conversion to liberal personhood, and thus he positions himself as someone who can build a postsocialist and postwar future.

Before the war, I had not planned ethnic cleansing or persecution, nor was I aware of any such plan. Two weeks into the war, I realised that a large number of non-Serbs had left and were continuing to leave the territory of Šamac municipality. I realised but I lacked courage to prevent the illegal and inhuman activities that were going on and that such treatment of non-Serbs, due to which those people left the territory of Šamac municipality. . . . I am ready to testify, to cooperate, and to say everything I know in the interests of truth and justice. My wish and hope is, and that depends on you, Your Honours, to go back to the wonderful prewar times that we had when all the people of Bosnia lived in unity and happily together. Unfortunately, I cannot change history. I would wish and am ready, if you give me such a chance, to try and improve the future. . . . I’m also ready to invest every effort in the new multi-ethnic Bosnia, to have a positive effect on the surroundings so that the inter-ethnic wounds should heal as soon as possible and that peoples and nations should live in mutual respect and harmony and thereby to atone for my sins up to a point, my sins towards men and to God.94

That Todorović should describe acts of ethnic intolerance and ethnic cleansing as inhuman and a sin against both men and God is telling of the new status of multiculturalism as the secular moral order in which human beings must place their faith in the postsocialist era.

Like Todorović, most of the guilty express their ardent wishes for multiethnic togetherness and for the people of Yugoslavia to be as they were before the war (the “Brotherhood and Unity” model). While the statements initially seem to parallel the ICTY’s mandate for multicultural tolerance as the path for reconciliation and peace, the multicultural ideal within the human rights regime differs in the kind of social world it seeks to produce for the future Balkan nations. In the progress narrative of the rule of liberal law emphasizing minority rights, tolerance, and economic reform, the emphasis is on the protection of the individual or the “minority” from the state rather than on a collective political vision like, for better or worse, the model of socialist self-governance in ex-Yugoslavia. This is not to say that the human rights project is an apolitical one. Unlike the guilty pleas that profess a desire to turn back the clock and express regret that they cannot bring back the past, the ICTY’s undertaking of reconciliation is not about bringing back a socialist past but, rather, about making a different kind of social and political future for the Balkan republics within an expanded Europe. As an institutional organ of the human rights regime, the Tribunal creates a new postsocialist human, a rights-bearing individual, who has faith in the principles of tolerance and minority rights as well as in the rule of international humanitarian and criminal law.

The human rights regime that is given jurisdiction over the former Yugoslavia through the ICTY thus enacts judgments and new laws that go hand in hand with other economic and social mechanisms of liberal development and reform. As Wendy Brown explains, human rights are ultimately “a politics” that organize “political space, often with the aim of monopolizing it. It also stands as a critique of dissonant political projects, converges neatly with the requisites of liberal imperialism and global free trade, and legitimates both as well.”95 The process of monopolizing justice, I would argue, is tied to the universalizing secular narrative of human redemption in this world, inherent in the concept of rights. Put otherwise, for a global human rights regime to truly monopolize social justice discourses and activism, people must place their faith in the concept of “rights” as the defining essence of humanity, rendered sacred through a belief in international law and domestic liberal reforms. To place one’s faith in the notion that as a human being one has certain rights (particularly those spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent UN documents) is to produce an imaginary of international human rights as a messianic engine of global progress that continually expands the bounds of humanity to include previously excluded others, such as women and religious and racial minorities, as rights-bearing subjects. The fact that these rights can be, and usually are, violated in instances of crisis or war simply furthers a notion that victims must maintain faith in the principles of human rights, which define the fundamental, irreducible quality of their humanness. This faith, in turn, gradually replaces and even criminalizes other possible systems of faith and notions of humanity and justice, as well as human desires and needs that might define the good life otherwise.

Seeing Otherwise and the Politics of Refusal

In light of the overwhelming enfolding of conflicting notions of the good life within human rights and humanitarian techniques of governance, it is important to ask whether it might be possible to see social worlds in those spaces that come to prominence in the global imaginary as spaces of atrocity without the spectacle of the devastated, injured body as the condition of possibility for redemption. Can life after war be materialized without taking recourse to therapeutic justice, healing, and rights as modes of redemption that require always returning to the camp? How might Bosnia itself refuse its geopolitical status as a forensic site and perpetual crime scene through which European and U.S. nations make meaning of postsocialist morality and humanity? A short 2003 Bosnian documentary entitled Slike sa ugla (Images from the Corner) is a powerful visual statement about the texture of ordinary life in postwar Bosnia that refuses the international humanitarian conceptions of justice, futurity, and body politics.96 The director, Jasmila Žbanić, a Bosnian artist who founded the independent production company Deblokada, makes documentary and feature films that attempt to capture the enmeshment of the war in the everyday lives of Bosnians. Conceiving of Sarajevo as a city whose complexity is a manifestation of the past, present, and future, coexisting in a multifaceted and often conflicted temporality, her films are saturated with the legacy of the war, while rejecting the messianic promises of international humanitarian governance that seek to freeze Bosnia in crisis as the birthplace of the camp in the new biopolitical era.

Not strictly a documentary, Slike sa ugla is a portrait of the kinds of fantasies that can take shape through absences, remembrances, and storytelling in the mode of seeing otherwise. The film’s images are of unremarkable landscapes and occurrences in present-day Sarajevo—soccer matches, nighttime streets, a vegetable market. There is no footage of the war, the dead, or the injured. The visual absence of wartime violence within contemporary Sarajevo is accompanied by a voice-over and interviews that focus almost exclusively on the legacies of war. Through the juxtaposition of scenes of ordinary postwar life with memories of violence and loss that are inescapable, the film asks how to talk about, represent, and live with the past without reinstating hatred and the fear of others. The first images in Slike sa ugla are those of the director at a circus with her young daughter. The cheerful music, bright costumes, and trained animals remind Žbanić that she has not been to the circus in ten years—not since the war started. As the camera zooms in on the face of the woman in the center of the ring, Žbanić’s voice-over tells us that she looks like Bilja, one of the most beautiful girls in Sarajevo, who lived in the director’s neighborhood. Bilja was badly injured in 1992, becoming one of the first to be wounded in Žbanić’s generation. As the scenes of white horses dancing around the circus performer continue, the voice-over informs us that though Žbanić and Bilja were not close, Bilja’s fate stayed with her, and her injury has continued to be one of the most painful and difficult images of the war.

The concept of one person’s fate remaining within another person frames the rest of the film as an ethics of recollection and fantasy that refuses to reduce an individual to her devastated, injured body. Bilja’s story, and Žbanić’s search for what happened to Bilja after the war, is also a story about Žbanić herself and about postwar life in Sarajevo. From the scenes of the circus, the film winds its way to the corner of Magribija Street, where an eighty-millimeter mortar shell injured Bilja. Nineteen pieces of shrapnel hit her, and she lost her arm. Her father and dog were killed on the spot. In the current day, the scene from the corner is uneventful. A gray residential building stands on the quiet street. A young boy speeds by on his bike. Filming the empty street corner, Žbanić tells a story of a French reporter who materialized out of nowhere just as the shell hit in 1992. As Bilja lay in a pool of blood, he did not help. He just kept snapping photos, using up three rolls of film. Bilja was evacuated from Sarajevo later that year, and no one knows exactly what happened to her afterward. The film then begins piecing together the story of what became of Bilja in the ensuing ten years through a series of conversations with friends and former neighbors. Some remember Bilja from her stay in the hospital. Others talk about catching a glimpse of her riding a bicycle on the street after being released. One friend even claims that he saw her walk by him at a café in Paris. These sightings and fantasies of Bilja’s life stand in contrast to the image of her injury that has traveled the world. The film does not just search for Bilja but also for the photograph of Bilja taken by the French reporter, which Žbanić’s friend tells her won the World Press Photo Award in 1992.

Throughout Slike sa ugla, Žbanić contrasts the images of war that Sarajevans continue to live with every day, and from which they cannot free themselves, with the images of the war taken by foreign reporters for the world to consume. During the war, she tells us, the people of Sarajevo became sensitive to the presence of cameras, which mercilessly photographed them without their permission. Returning to the corner where Bilja was injured, Žbanić admits to finding the famous photograph of Bilja on the Internet. The photo made her feel the same way she did when she first saw it—humiliated, angry, and insulted. Refusing to show the photograph in the film, she explains that it would be wounding Bilja all over again by exposing her to the gaze of strangers. Instead, Žbanić goes to the famous Holiday Inn where all the foreign reporters used to stay. The images of the now-empty hotel lobby are accompanied by the telling of a story rumored to be true in the old neighborhood about how Bilja walked over to that hotel after leaving the hospital. As the story goes, Bilja found the French photographer and asked him how he could just stand there, taking pictures of her without helping. He responded that he was just doing his job. Ever since she heard that story, Žbanić admits to being curious about just how long it would take to use up three rolls of film. The film cuts to a shot of the empty corner of Magribija Street, and the scene is re-created through the sounds of a clicking camera and the noise of the roll of film being rewound and replaced with a new one. Though it takes less than a minute to use up three rolls, it feels endless. Nevertheless, that minute does not encompass Bilja’s life or personhood. The man who claims to have seen her in Paris tells Žbanić that Bilja is now working on a screenplay for her own film. She is the one behind the camera in France. Žbanić wonders whether it is a coincidence that both she and Bilja decided to work in film after the war. She asks herself whether by making this film about her search for Bilja she will be able to see Magribija Street differently. Can she create new images that will free her of the old ones? The film ends with Žbanić standing at a train station. A voice, which audiences are meant to presume belongs to Bilja, speaks in French. We hear that, finally, after a decade, she is preparing to visit Sarajevo. As a train pulls out of the station, leaving Sarajevo, Žbanić remains standing on the platform—Bilja has not arrived. In a final voice-over, Žbanić muses that as new wars entice journalists to move on to new places, making new images of violence and death (the news), Sarajevans remain at home, left to live with the old images, all the while seeking to make new ones.

Slike sa ugla proposes that to see otherwise requires a politics of refusal. The most important refusal is the film’s visual denunciation of the image of Bilja’s injured body. Rather than reproduce this image as evidence of Bosnians’ wartime inhumanity, stories about the image represent the inhumanity of Euro-American modes of documentation and the sedimentation of the other. Slike sa ugla does not forget Bilja’s pain but neither does it reinflict the moment of injury and loss. Instead, it replaces the World Press photo with fantasy images of Bilja constructed through hearsay, rumor, and remembrance. Like the photographers criticized in Slike sa ugla, the Tribunal, a cornerstone of the new human rights regime, needs to continually reproduce the devastated body, though rather than through images it does so through the authority of the word (testimony) and the law. In doing so, it freezes Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia in a moment of atrocity, legible on the body, like the moment of Bilja’s wounding. In this sense, the absence of Bilja’s body throughout Žbanić’s film becomes a radical politics and ethics of rejecting the role of the other against which Euro-American morality and humanity are affirmed. Bilja’s absence is productive of stories and fantasies about the continuation of her life and the life of Sarajevans and Bosnians. In other words, her absence is not a sign of emptiness but of richness. These stories are part of a heterogeneous temporality in which the past, present, and future are superimposed on each street corner and in each individual. Constructing new images does not replace the old ones with which Sarajevans coexist on a day-to-day basis. Rather, the film suggests, if the new images are to be ethical, they must not attempt to encompass entire worlds in a single moment, nor to displace or erase the past in a temporality of messianic redemption. An ethical image, as well as an ethical politics, is rather that which actively struggles with the complexities of everyday living, remembrance, fear, and fantasy, for all the discomfort, possibility, silence, and contradictions to which it may lead.