In Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), directed by Jasmila Zbanic, the role of the UN troops in Srebrenica is one of the key themes. This film was the first to tell the story of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica as a feature film, inspired by former UN translator in Srebrenica Hasan Nuhanovic’s personal experience.
Zbanic and Nuhanovic were at first to work jointly in telling Hasan’s story but Zbanic subsequently told Nuhanovic’s story through a fictional female UN translator, Aida Selmanagic, who does all she can to try to save her husband and two sons.
Despite her work for the UN and all her efforts, the Dutch battalion officers refuse to try and save them. In July 1995, the Dutch battalion refused to add Nuhanovic’s family members to a UN list that could have saved their lives.
The Dutch battalion stationed in Srebrenica symbolised not only the UN troops’ indifference but also their complicity in the genocide, and Zbanic presents this in the film. The presence of the UN troops – the blue helmets and the UN flag – led the Bosniaks in Srebrenica to assume that they would be protected in the UN compound by the UN troops.
If there was a key symbol of the UN’s complicity, it would be the widely-circulated images of Dutch commander Thom Karremans drinking with Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic in July 1995 – taken as Mladic’s troops were perpetrating the genocide.
Zbanic’s film shows how the cloak of the UN’s bureaucratic terminology, the indifference and unwillingness to stand up for people even in a UN “safe area”, led to one of the most shameful chapters in its history.
The three films can also be interpreted as how the story of foreigners is told many years after the war. Tanovic portrays the UN through the prism of a hapless individual soldier with deeply cynical higher-ups who show up but do not solve a problem. In other words, present but irrelevant.
For Zalica, the foreigner is portrayed as a supervisor with an aura of discipline to oversee local corrupt officials who, in turn, are apologetic to the foreigner.
Zbanic tells the real story of an unfolding genocide in which foreigners – the UN – provided a false hope of security while involving themselves in active complicity with Mladic’s henchmen.
This is how three of the best-known post-war Bosnian-produced films presented (largely fictional) foreigners. However, many real foreigners in Bosnia from 1992 onwards left a positive mark, such as Christiane Amanpour, with her reporting from the besieged capital of Sarajevo for CNN. Many of these other stories of how foreigners spoke up for Bosnia in the 1990s and worked to assist in rebuilding Bosnia after Dayton have yet to be told on screen.
As scholars and pundits consider the many legacies of Dayton as a peace agreement, it is worth recalling how it also meant the arrival of foreign citizens with varying forms of presence and authority in Bosnia – a frequently overlooked development in its recent history, and one which, like Dayton itself, continues to have an impact to this day.
Hamza Karcic is a professor at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Sarajevo.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.