The USC Shoah Foundation added a pilot collection of 20 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia into its Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a new collaboration with the Srebrenica Memorial Center.
The testimonies document the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys and the deportation of over 25,000 women and children that occurred as part of the ethnic cleansing campaign in eastern BiH during the war.
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USC Shoah Foundation Interim Executive Director, Kori Street, said the Srebrenica genocide “remains a moral stain on Europe, a mass murder perpetrated at the centre of the continent 50 years after the world vowed, ‘Never again’.”
“Preserving these voices in the Visual History Archive pays tribute to the victims and provides opportunities for research and education about this relatively recent example of genocide,” she said.
The testimonies of Bosnian survivors recorded by the Srebrenica Memorial Center their livers before, during and after the war and their experiences during the genocide.
“The groundbreaking new partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the Srebrenica Memorial Center is a major step in creating a space for Srebrenica genocide survivors to share their experiences and educate others globally,” the Foundation said.
Srebrenica Memorial Center Director, Dr. Emir Suljagic, said the partnership and inclusion of the testimonies into the VHA comes at a critical time.
“In the era of denial and post-truth societies, these individual narratives are always a strong ally in the face of those who wish to support revisionism,” he said.
The Foundation said that in the coming months the initial 20 testimonies in the VHA will be indexed, which is “an intricate process by which terms from the archive’s 60,000+ keyword thesaurus will be assigned to each minute of testimony by a team of specially trained experts in Bosnia.”
“The VHA is the world leader in the archival capture, preservation and access to testimony related to the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. Its 55,000 firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are indexed by keywords including geographical locations and time periods and are available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public,” it said.
According to Dr. Badema Pitic, Acting Research Associate at USC Shoah Foundation, including these testimonies “will not only ensure their preservation and representation alongside other events in the archive, but it also will fill a gap in the research on this topic.”
She explained that the testimonies about the war and genocide in Bosnia will enable the interrogation of questions such as how the experiences of survivors of “ethnic cleansing” compare to the experiences of those who survived the genocide, what the patterns, forms, and dynamics of violence in ethnically cleansed areas of Bosnia were and how the ethnic cleansing that took place in Bosnia compares to current events, specifically to the current cases of identity-based persecution.
Along with being preserved in the Visual History Archive in perpetuity, the testimonies from this collection will also be featured on the Foundation’s IWitness educational website.
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