Srebrenica burial ceremonies on YouTube: Remembering the dead and the missing in a contested political situation

Authors

• Laura Huttunen University of Tampere

Abstract

In this paper, I analyse a body of YouTube videos depicting the annual reburial cum memorial ceremony in Potočari, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which commemorates the victims of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The 8,000 victims that went missing after the assault on Srebrenica are among the totality of victims of the 1992–1995 Bosnian War. Around 100,000 people lost their lives in the conflict, but in addition to this grave figure, there is also a peculiar group of victims – the 30,000 people who remained missing after the war had ended. The complicated process of locating and identifying the missing has taken years, creating a situation where remembering and commemorating the dead merges with remembering and commemorating the missing. Moreover, the difficult political legacy of the war has created a situation where remembering the dead and the missing is often understood within a heavily politicized atmosphere. The intensity of the Srebrenica tragedy, as well as the international media attention it receives, makes the Srebrenica victims more visible than the other victims in Bosnia, both nationally and internationally. The widespread presence of this remembrance online is part of this visibility. There are dozens of video clips on YouTube showing various stages of the annual ceremony in Potočari: sometimes they are long shots showing the unfolding of the ceremony in real time, while other clips are heavily edited collages of the event with added music. In this paper, these practices of online remembrance are interpreted through the concepts of liminality, witnessing and cultural memory. I argue that the internet has become an effective site to circulate and put forward witness accounts as testimonies. They enable the creation of specific communities of memory across spatial distance.