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Stories
Dealing With The Past – True Stories Market Selected stories
Nobody’s Children
Nobody’s Children is an autobiographical story about Sara Velaga, who grew up without a father from the day she was born in 1994. Her father, Siniša Velaga, Captain of the Armed Forces, left her mother during their exile in Banja Luka, and never got back in touch with her. Sara received nothing but a surname from her father – a reminder that you can be “someone’s” even when you are “nobody’s.” Sara returned to Jajce, where she lives as a national minority and persists in trying answer the question: Why did you leave us? Contact for the story:
Sara Velaga velagasara@gmail.com
Generation 70/72
In March 1990, the generation born between 1970 and 1972 went to serve in the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA). Recruitment continued until April 1991. This is the story of a cohort whose fate was determined in 1990, when they were conscripted to serve in the YPA. By April 1992, more than one hundred had been killed. Today, those who survived still suffer the psychological consequences. This is a story about families who fought to save their sons, as well as those who hid military documents in Sarajevo in December 1991, thus preventing the continuation of conscription. Contact for the story:
Melina Kamerić melina.kameric@gmail.com
Jadranka Reihl-Kir
In the words of Drago Hedl, Josip Reihl-Kir was “an unusually decent man, with polite manners completely atypical for chiefs of police in Osijek until then.” In June 1991, Reihl-Kir addressed the Osijek Assembly with the words, “While I am the chief of the Osijek-Baranja Police Administration, there will be no war between Serbs and Croats in this area.” He already had reason to fear for his own safety. He warned his superiors about this and asked to be transferred to Zagreb. Instead of going to Zagreb, on 1 July, he headed to Tenja to negotiate with the rebel Serbs in the village. On his way back to Osijek, at the Croatian police checkpoint in Tenja, Josip Reihl-Kir was assassinated. The perpetrator, Antun Gudelj, was a member of the reserve police force and a subordinate of Reihl-Kir. Using a Kalashnikov he had recently received from the chief himself, Gudelj fired sixteen bullets into the car Riehl-Kir was riding in, also killing local officials Goran Zobundzija and Milan Knezević, leaving Mirko Tubić as the lone survivor. Widowed, Jadranka Reihl-Kir fought for nineteen years to discover the truth about the murder in court. The day after the murder, Josip Boljkovac, who had approved Reihl-Kir’s transfer, was removed from the police station. After fleeing the country, Gudelj was convicted in absentia in 1994, and pardoned two years later. After being extradited to Croatia, Antun Gudelj was again sentenced in 2008 to a single prison sentence of twenty years. In 2009, the Supreme Court upheld the first-instance verdict.
Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past – encourages the process of dealing with the past in Croatia, through documenting and investigating pre-war, wartime and post-war events, and works with civil society organisations, government institutions and similar centres abroad. Contact for the story:
Milena Žarković milenazarkovic@hotmail.com
Reintegration or exodus?
The departure of tens of thousands of people in early 1996. from parts of Sarajevo and those of its suburbs that were controlled by the Bosnian Serb army during the war remains a dark, painful and never-told story. After a brutal four-year siege of the capital of an internationally recognised state and the horrific crimes that accompanied it, Sarajevo, like the former Yugoslavia, remained divided. The goals of the owners of the dark who waved national flags before the war, thereby ignoring the civic concept of the state, have been met: ethnically “clean” territories ruled by “us or them” and a convulsive struggle to maintain an unsustainable, retrograde concept. The price has been paid – and is still being paid – by the citizens on both sides of the war and post-war demarcation line, as well as by the generations to come. Necessary if the story of the siege of the city is to be completed, a documentary will look at the causes of these events and their consequences, not only for the population but also for the identity of Sarajevo, now one of few European cities that remain divided. The longer we remain silent about such things, the more painful the slap of truth will be. Contact for the story:
