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/