Bosnia and the Targeting of History and Memory

Recorded November 25, 2019. A public lecture by Helen Walasek
(University of Exeter) is organised by Trinity Long Room Hub as
part of the 'Out of the Ashes' Lecture Series. Dr Walaseks lecture
will be followed by a response on the topic by Dr. Balázs Apor,
Director of the Centre for European Studies in TCD. It is nearly
twenty-five years since the end of the 1992¬–1995 Bosnian War, a
brutal conflict which continues to reverberate in the public
imagination. Memories of that war have revived with the
highly-publicised attacks on cultural heritage in Syria and Iraq
that followed the rise of Islamic State. As in these contemporary
conflicts, one of the defining features of the Bosnian War was the
systematic and widespread destruction of cultural and religious
property as secessionist groups and their allies carried out their
violent campaigns of ethnic cleansing in an attempt to enforce an
ideology of ethnic separation and create mono-ethnic territories.
We explore not only the destruction and the attacks on culture
during the Bosnian War, but the long-term impact ethnic cleansing,
territorial division and the ethnicization of heritage has had on
the restoration of cultural property, on museums, galleries,
libraries and archives, and its effect on everyone from returning
refugees to academics and historians. We ask: is it possible to
recover from such destruction, erasure and division? Creating,
destroying and recovering human knowledge and cultural heritage –
these are themes with enormous contemporary resonance. They are
also processes with a deep history, both in an Irish context and
across the globe. About the Speaker Helen Walasek is an Honorary
Associate Research Fellow at University of Exeter and is the author
of Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage (Routledge
2015). She was an Associate of the Bosnian Institute, London, and
Deputy Director of Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue (BHHR) for
which she worked 1994–1998. She has made many working visits to
Bosnia during and after the 1992-1995 war and was an Expert
Consultant for the Council of Europe reporting on museums in
Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and 1996, as well as an advisor to the
Swedish NGO Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB). BHHR was the
only heritage NGO accredited by UNHCR as a humanitarian aid
organisation working in Bosnia during the war and was the official
representative of the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina
(Zemaljski Muzej) outside Bosnia at that timed The Out of the Ashes
lecture series is generously supported by Sean and Sarah Reynolds.
About the series Year 2 (2019–20) Destroying considers a form of
cultural atrocity now subject to international war crimes
prosecution—the deliberate targeting of cultural heritage as a
means to control social memory and to erase identities. The
programme includes a special panel event on the Four Courts Blaze
of 1922 organized in association with the Irish National Committee
of the Blue Shield. The basis for the Blue Shield is the 1954 Hague
Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property and its
additional first and second protocols, ratified by Ireland in 2018.
This three-year lecture series explores the theme of cultural loss
and recovery across the centuries, from the destruction of the
Library of Alexandria in antiquity to contemporary acts of cultural
loss and destruction. A panel of world-leading experts reflects on
how societies deal with cultural trauma through reconstruction and
commemoration, and on how the international community should
respond to cultural loss. The series is global in scope,
pan-historical and multi-disciplinary in approach, and features a
panel of international scholars and practitioners of the highest
calibre. See details of the full series here
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/whats-on/details/2018/out-of-the-ashes.php
Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/