‘Bosnian Girl’: Nationalism and Innocence Through Images of Women

by Elissa Helms

“….Among Samarah’s Srebrenica photographs are the images of grafffijiti left on the walls of the battery factory in Potočari by the Dutch UN peacekeeping troops headquartered there. One that stands out is a gendered slur: “No teeth. . .? A mustache. . .? Smel like shit. . .? Bosnian Girl!” (Bosnian should be read to mean Bosniac, as in the population of the Srebrenica enclave. I return to this designation below.) Such a level of disdain for a population they were supposed to be protecting makes all the more plausible the eventual complicity of the Dutch in the surrender of civilians to death and expulsion at the hands of the invading Serbs. It can be seen as an even further insult when one considers the situation at the time the graffiti was written: the desperate conditions in the enclave (among other things hardly conducive to adequate grooming practices) had propelled many women to trade sex for food or favors from the UN soldiers or powerful Bosniac leaders, and both groups had engaged in various forms of sexual abuse of Bosniac women (NIOD 2002). Seen in light of the whole war in Bosnia, the implied (or denied) sexualization of the “Bosnian Girl” was even more chilling against evidence of mass rapes and sexual torture, the majority by Serb forces against Muslim women. Even the hint of possibility that Muslim women might be willing sexual partners clashed uncomfortably with the otherwise dominant image of Bosniac women as passive but noble victims of rape (Helms 2003b, Hromadžić 2007, Žarkov 1997). If anything, it was a reminder that war had put Bosniac women in a position of vulnerability to ‘other’ soldiers – Serbs, Croats, and even UN troops – and away from the protection of ‘their’ men, a further blow to Bosniac masculinity.

Thus, when the graffiti was publicized, after the fall of the enclave and in the context of the whole Bosnian war and the post-war period of international intervention, the soldier’s words had an even wider meaning. His attitude towards the ‘locals’ showed a broader disdain on the part of ‘the west,’ fijirst in refusing to intervene militarily during the war and thus save thousands of lives, and later in the sorts of stories that emerged about how western aid workers and political representatives treated the local population as an inferior society. This was but one strand of feeling toward the west, as there were also many Bosnians who expressed their profound gratefulness to the US and NATO, for example, for ending the siege of Sarajevo when they bombed Serb positions in the last months of the war. But it was a love-hate relationship, as the arrogant and ignorant attitudes of many of the foreigners who now descended on BiH to work on various aspects of reconstruction (see Coles 2002) began to irritate people. Especially after the 9/11 attacks on the US, complaints of anti-Muslim bias or western actions unfavorable to Bosnia were heard more and more, though in the form that corresponded to individuals’ worldviews and political orientations.

The Dutch graffiti was yet another piece of damning evidence against the west, not only for the failures in Srebrenica but more generally. To these connotations, Sarajevo artist Šejla Kamerić added several new layers and a boost of public visibility with a poster entitled “Bosnian Girl.” The image overlaid her own photograph – looking stern but confijident in a white tank top – with the Dutch grafffijiti, creating a stark contrast between the soldier’s description and her own image as a “Bosnian girl” Here was an explicit challenge to the arrogance of the west, a proud statement against the ugly stereotypes reproduced in the international media. The contrast was not only with the attributes listed, but between the beautiful, worldly, educated artist from the city (who could surely spell in English better than the Dutch soldier!) and the image of the typical Srebrenica refugee. However, as I have written elsewhere (Helms 2008: 111–113), there were those in Sarajevo who interpreted Kamerić’s image not only as an indictment of the ‘international community’ but also as a conscious distancing of the urban, cosmopolitan artist from the despised rural refugees epitomized by the Srebrenica enclave population.

Posters of this image first appeared in July 2003 in Sarajevo pasted in clusters on billboards and hung in multiple copies along the route through the center of the city that would be taken by a set of remains of Srebrenica victims as they were driven to Potočari for (re)burial. The posters were thus waiting to bear witness to the procession of the remains, just as human onlookers would. The presence of these remains, and the knowledge that thousands more were waiting to be identifijied and given a proper burial, would remind onlookers of the fate of the population addressed in the graffiti, further strengthening the impact of the artist’s shaming gaze. The posters were jarring at first, at least to those who understood the English. I saw many Sarajevans walk up to them (as I had also done) to read the small print at the bottom, also in English, which explained the context and origin of the graffiti. They talked about it in social gatherings, where those who did not understand were fijilled in. With the absence of explanation in the local language, the posters seem to have been directed primarily at a foreign audience, to remind the many visiting westerners of their own complicity in the Srebrenica tragedy they were now in BiH to commemorate.

Some Bosnians felt comforted by the foreigners, whose presence legitimized their feeling of collective victimhood. But others were fed up with the ‘war tourism’ just as they were fed up with everything that kept attention on the war and its victims and away from the many other problems of the post-war period. Kamerić’s poster thus refocused attention on Bosniac victimhood, not so much at the hands of the Serbs, though this was not lost in her message, but even by their supposed allies in ‘the west.’ At the same time, however, it constructed a sophisticated, cosmopolitan ‘us,’ just as modern as those western visitors, as the ones with the worldly knowledge to condemn on behalf of the wretched, silenced victims…”