CHECHNYA: another humanitarian worker abducted and killed

Zarema Sadulayeva, an activist of the humanitarian NGO  Save the Generation, which works with chechen children victims of the war, and her husband Umar Dzhabrailov were found dead today, after having been abducted yesterday from the office of the NGO.

Human Rights Watch describes the NGO  Let’s save the generation in these terms:

“””Save the Generation is a nongovernmental organization in Chechnya founded in 2001 that provides psychological and physical rehabilitation to disabled children, orphans, and other socially vulnerable groups. The group also works closely with UNICEF, among other groups, to provide training about landmines, and promotes protection of the rights of the disabled.“””

Update: Owen posted on the comments a press release from the swiss-based Society for Threatened Peoples that is worth reading.

INVISIBLE SIGHTS: Café Turco sister blog!

I still keep the card that Jelena Markovic gave me when we first met. It says:

Jelena Marković

Film and TV Director

I understand that in such a small piece of paper we can only write the essential informations that we want others to remember, but as I got to know her I realized that her artistic skills go much further than her chosen profession (although Film and TV Director does sound glamourous). Jelena expresses her perspective about the society in which she lives as well as her impressions on everyday life using all forms of art that she can reach. She writes, not only her scripts, but also poetry, prose and essays, both in her mother tongue, serbian, and english; she photographs, she also draws and recently she started developing the technique of collage, with impressive visual effects. For her, art has no boundaries, and she is not afraid to dive into the unknown. That’s one of the features I most appreciate in her, because i particularly dislike boundaries, frontiers and all physical or mental devices designed to keep people apart and diminish their freedom of movement and expression.
A committed artist, Jelena works with the purpose to reach an audience, but she does so in a very subtle way, so that we, her audience, may immediately feel attracted by her art productions, but only slowly will realize our their deeper meaning. I remember that, the second time that I watched her documentary Connections, I was amazed with the amount of details that had escaped me the first time. The same happened with some of her poems, and then with her collages.
I consider myself extremely lucky to have a person like Jelena Markovic as my friend. Jelena always welcomes me to her home when I go to Belgrade, and the first time I ever drank turkish coffee it was Jelena who prepared it for me. It is also a privilege and a pleasure to observe her work progressing and to discuss mine with her.
On my last stay in Belgrade, after we concluded our deep research on our favorite saint, Sveti Sloba, I invited her to join me on my blog. We then decided that it made more sense that each of us should have its own blog. Friendship allows intimacy, but also requires a certain distance, and anyway blogs are nowadays our best presentation cards so it’s better that they are individual. This is how Café Turco’s sister blog, Invisible Sights, was born.
I believe Invisible Sights is a blog worth visiting, not because Jelena is my friend, but because there we can find a cosmopolitan, uncompromising perspective on serbian society and life in Belgrade that may be very helpful to help deconstruct the prevalent stereotypes about Serbia. It is not only an artist’s blog, but really a citizen’s blog. Serbia being a country where culture was and still is so widely exploited by nationalism, I am sure that those people who think it is worth supporting the development of a civic culture in Serbia will find her blog appealing.

On the photo: Jelena drinking turkish coffee (my photo).

SREBRENICA

This year i attended the annual cerimony in Srebrenica for the first time. I didn’t have the intention to write about it, at least not immediately, but the staff from Women in Black, the NGO that organized the bus in which I travelled from Belgrade to Potočari, gave me a questionnaire for me to fill, so I did write about it. In the end, they didn’t collect my statement, and my friend Jelena, to whom I read it afterwords, though I should publish it on my blog, so that is what I am doing now, with a new part that I have decided to add while I was typing the original handwritten text. The photos published in this post were taken by me.

QUESTIONNAIRE:

Koji put ideš u Srebrenici?

To je bio prvi put.

Šta za tebe u emotivnom, moralnom i političkom pogledu znači posećivanje mesta zloćina posećinjenih u naše ime/Srebrenica?

It was my duty to come to Srebrenica, not because genocide was committed in my name, as I am not serbian, but because I believe it is essential to my work as a researcher in Political Science that I always keep in my mind that the subjects I study, analyze and present to my readers had and continue to have real implication in the lives of real people. It is not difficult for a researcher to loose that sense of reality as he is submerged by all kinds of informations, data and theories. The need to respect the dignity of the victims of violence imposes on me that I never forget that, otherwise my work would be no more than an intellectual exercise to feed my self-image.

Koje ti je osnovni razlog da odlazak u Srebrenicu?

The answer to this question is contained in the the first question.

Koji ti je najvažniji utisak iz Srebrenice/Potočara?

My strongest impression is the small girl who asked me to take her picture. She was probably 6. I am sorry to say that I don’t remember her name. She was beautiful and her mother and grandmother were very generous to allow me to take her picture. They even unleashed her blonde hair so that she might look even better. She was very happy.
I could say the walls covered with blood in the building in Potočari impressed me most, but as a researcher it is my job to deal with that kind of morbid details.
The beautiful girl, and all the other children I got the chance to meet in my trips around former Yugoslavia are what gives my work a purpose. She means that the past is important, but that it is the future that really matters.

My answer to the questionnaire stopped here, because I had already used all the available space in the paper sheet. However, I was not satisfied with the abrupt way in which it ended. I am aware that my last phrase does sound like a cliché, but for me it has a real meaning. Saying that the best in the world are the children does sound like a cliché, but one of the most beautiful poems ever written in portuguese, Liberdade, also ends like that (o melhor do mundo são as crianças), so I rely on Fernando Pessoa to defend myself from the accusation that burdens me of being too emotional, a critique that usually implies that my work is biased or contaminated by an excessive subjectivity.
Dealing with suffering always demands a certain degree of emotional attachment, and this is something one has to learn to deal with. It comes with the job. The focus on objectivity, neutrality or impartiality is usually a way to escape it that but one that carries with it the danger of moral relativization.

I cannot be indifferent to the fact that yesterday thousands of people gathered to pay respect to the dead, but what I witnessed yesterday does not resume to that. I also saw how life is much stronger than death and this is why racists and genociders particularly hate others’ children.
By bringing their children to Srebrenica, these families are preserving the memory of their deceased, they are creating a link between generations that were denied the possibility to live together and enjoy each other’s company. On the children will one day rely the double responsibility to both honor the dead by protecting them from oblivion and to overcome the legacy that burdens their families.

This will not be an easy task. To be able to cope with such responsibility in the future they need to be nurtured now. It is up to today’s adults to provide them with an environment that allows them to grow into self-confident decent adults. If we achieve, these children will represesent the genociders ultimate failure.