The Srebrenica Memorial Center

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Last summer, Ed Garnett the new Communications Intern for the Collective spent a month at the Srebrenica Memorial Center Potocari. Here Ed, who is in Stage 3 of his History degree at Newcastle, writes about the Center’s oral history work and its significance to remembering genocide.

The Center

The Center was opened in 2000 to commemorate the genocide perpetrated in 1995 – the worst atrocity Europe has seen since the Second World War. Located where it happened, in the east Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, the Memorial Center has a large exhibition space and a sprawling cemetery with over 8,000 grave sites. It serves as a place of remembrance, prayer, and education, ensuring the memory of genocide is neither forgotten nor denied.

Photo: Edward Garnett, Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery

Oral History

At the heart of the work of the Memorial Center is its oral history team, spearheaded by genocide survivor and author Hasan Hasanović. This team has worked to create an extensive archive of testimonies, preserving the stories of genocide for future generations.

Survivors are invited into the Memorial Center’s studio, where their testimonies are recorded using professional camera equipment and microphones. For those in remote areas, the team travels to ensure there is no story left unheard.

The Memorial Center is steadfast in its commitment to keeping those with a first-hand experience of genocide at the forefront of understanding. Their aim is to humanise the historical narrative and provide a depth to court rulings and statistics, which are often the focus in genocide research.

Each account in the archive is recorded, stored, transcribed, and translated, making it accessible for researchers internationally. While it is not yet publicly accessible, plans are underway to make it available in the coming years, creating a useful resource for understanding the genocide.

Photo: Edward Garnett, The Oral History Studio

Oral History Exhibitions

A collection of interviews forms a permanent exhibition inside of the Memorial Center: the poignant Lives Behind the Fields of Death project. This exhibition combines oral testimonies with artefacts donated by survivors and families. These items, including photographs and other personal belongings, are displayed alongside interactive screens where visitors can hear the stories behind them. Sometimes, the objects are the only surviving mementos of loved ones lost in the genocide, yet relatives and former friends willingly donate to aid the mission of the Memorial Center.

The combination of oral accounts and physical objects creates a visceral connection to the past. It underscores that the victims of genocide are not just numbers, but rather that they existed, they had their own lives, they had their own names, and they had their own belongings.

Tackling Current Issues

Bosnia remains a deeply divided nation, lacking a shared narrative of the war and the mechanisms for transitional justice. And while genocide denial and historical revisionism is happening at a local and state-level in Bosnia, the work of NGOs like the Srebrenica Memorial Center is critical.

The Center actively tackles distortions and silences through public engagement, aiming to ensure that accountability and truth remains at the forefront of public discourse. One of their key initiatives by staff are the annual Genocide Denial Reports. These reports use evidence-based monitoring to reveal the frequency and methods of genocide denial, while providing recommendations to address and counteract these harmful narratives.

Additionally, the Memorial Center seeks to influence future researchers in the field of transitional justice, social sciences, and human rights. This past summer, in 2024, I was part of a cohort of students from across the globe who congregated in the small village of Srebrenica for a week of informative lectures and field trips.

We left the programme enriched, gaining both knowledge applicable to our research and a network of like-minded peers. It reaffirmed the commitment of the Memorial Center to fostering international dialogue and awareness as well as addressing genocide denial.

The work of the Memorial Center is critically important – not only in preserving the memory of genocide but also in shaping the future of Bosnia and progressing transitional justice. I encourage everyone to explore their work, listen to testimonies from the Lives Behind the Fields of Death project, and read a section of the eye-opening Denial Reports. These initiatives provide an important foundation for establishing truth and combatting forces of denial.

Photo: Srebrenica Memorial Center, ‘First International Summer School’

Relevant Links

Srebrenica Memorial Center Website: https://srebrenicamemorial.org/en

Lives Behind the Fields of Death: https://zivotiizapoljasmrti.srebrenicamemorial.org/en

Brief Overview of West Balkan Genocide Denial: https://srebrenicamemorial.org/en/page/denial/29

The latest Genocide Denial Report (2023): https://srebrenicamemorial.org/bs/istrazivanja/srebrenica-genocide-denial-report-2023/18

Paying Our Way

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Since 2018, the Newcastle University Oral History Collective (NUOHC) has coordinated two projects addressing key contemporary and historical social justice issues around poverty and food insecurity: Foodbank Histories and the Mutual Aid Oral History Project. In this post Silvie Fisch and Jack Hepworth extend shared authority into interpretation on more equitable terms with community researchers.

Picture of "rubbish" - a doll, a clothes peg and a jigsaw.
Photo: Silvie Fisch, What remains?

Oral history interviews recorded for these projects have stimulated engagement, outreach, and creative re-use activities. Most recently, Live Theatre’s youth group drew upon interview testimonies to create “Fed Up”, a production investigating how food poverty affects young people across the North East.

In May 2024 the Live Theatre team brought their production to an appreciative audience at Newcastle Cathedral. When the final curtain was drawn, we rattled our donation buckets in aid of the Newcastle Foodbank. That same evening, it came to our attention that one of our interviewees – a single mother of two young children, whose interview recording was used in the production – did not have enough money to top up her electricity meter.

Here we are, smug with pride about doing good, helping to improve the reputations of institutions and companies, and furthering our own careers. Even worse, often we help to reinforce the prevailing conditions, instead of trying to drive fundamental change.

Last year, The Social Change Agency invited OHUC member organisation Northern Cultural Projects – a Community Interest Company – to become part of the learning community, to produce a handbook designed to embed mutually beneficial payment for involvement policies.

This involvement, combined with our doubts concerning current research involvement practices, underpins our new project Paying Our Way: Research Participation and Fair Pay. The project has received vital support from Newcastle University’s Social Justice Fund and Engagement and Place Fund.

Paying Our Way aims to extend the benefits for community researchers and research participants with first-hand experience of the issues we seek to address. We are exploring how best to involve research participants in project design, delivery, and decision-making. The project further considers how to remunerate participants for their involvement, without compromising any welfare entitlement.

Mutual Aid service users in the east end of Newcastle will choose materials for a new HCA website to reinterpret and showcase the previous projects. Their curation will ensure these projects’ continual relevance and accessibility to people with experience of economic disadvantage. With the help of our community researchers, we have organised an engagement event for the local community, that has evaluated the website’s content for relevance and to stimulate discussions around our previous research findings. The event included peer-to-peer translation and interpretation by and for members of different ethnic communities.

For the project’s next phase, we want to produce recommendations for the fair remuneration of research participants with direct experience of economic and social disadvantage. Our aim here is not simply to involve marginalised individuals. Rather, we hope to find better ways to support our community researchers and research participants in sharing authority beyond the collection of oral histories, and to design mutually beneficial methods for collaborative social and historical justice research.

Remember 1926

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Joe Redmayne, a Collective researcher associate, introduces our new “Remember 1926” project and its launch. The project is a collaboration between Newcastle University’s Oral History Collective (OHC) and Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG).

(Photograph of Dr Joe Redmayne at the Durham Miners’ Gala promoting the Remember 1926 project. OHC colleagues

Joe Redmayne at the Durham Miners’ Gala promoting the Remember 1926 project.

The project explores ways in which the centenary of the British General Strike of 1926 ought to be commemorated in two years’ time and seeks to understand the legacy of the strike in the lived experience of members of today’s trade unions and the wider labour movement.

The project launched at the 138th Durham Miners’ Gala on Saturday 13 July 2024, with a stall and leaflets to promote the project among attendees. We would encourage people to get in touch with their photographs, family stories, and memorabilia to help shed light on the General Strike.

Remember 1926 will revisit the General Strike, reassess the action and its place in our collective memory, as well as appreciate the aspirations of those who participated. To that extent, the group is attempting to commemorate and catch the last voices and their echoes over time from 1926.

(Photograph of Joe with the former leader of the Labour Party and now Independent MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, holding the Remember 1926 leaflets.)

Joe with the former leader of the Labour Party and now Independent MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, holding the Remember 1926 leaflets (see below).

Get involved

In the future, Remember 1926 will foster dialogue and prompt collaboration between trade unionists, political activists, academic researchers, community partners, heritage groups, archives, and museums. If you would like to keep updated or get more involved with the project, please complete the following questionnaire via the link (Get involved).

You can visit our webpage and social media below:

https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/commemoratingthecentenaryofthegeneralstrike1926

@1926Remember If you have any immediate questions about the project, please get in touch with Joe Redmayne via email at j.redmayne2@newcastle.ac.uk

Royal Holloway MA Public History student, Rachel Lawrence, interviewing Joe about the Remember 1926 project and his thoughts about the Durham Miners’ Gala.

Royal Holloway MA Public History student, Rachel Lawrence, interviewing Joe about the Remember 1926 project and his thoughts about the Durham Miners’ Gala.

Share your family stories, photographs, and memorabilia

If you have a story of an ancestor who participated in the General Strike, please let us know, as we would love to hear your family stories. You can contribute your own family stories via the following link Remember 1926 Questionnaire to help us grasp the different experiences of those involved in the strike and comprehend how your story lives on today.

Please include your name and email address, so we may be able to contact you in the future. Some of the questions the project is interested in answering are listed below: ·

What are the legacies of the General Strike? ·

What difference to Britain did the strike make? · What caused it? Could it have been avoided?

Is it an event still discussed by different generations of workers today? · Are there any family/community histories passed down through generations that still live on in today’s collective memory? · Have these stories shaped the descendants view of the trade union movement? · Why do people still strike today? · How and why should the centenary of the strike be commemorated?

Live Theatre: Fed Up!

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The Oral History Unit and Collective’s Foodbank Histories and Mutual Aid Oral History projects address the social and historical justice issues of Food Poverty. The projects have reached completion, but the issues remain, and the interviews and findings continue to influence ongoing research, public awareness and engagement initiatives. Here Unit Associate Researcher, Silvie Fisch reviews Live Youth Theatre‘s new production of Fed Up.

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Joe Redmayne joins Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit and Collective for Historic England’s ‘Women in Shipbuilding’ project.

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Joe Redmayne has joined Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit and Collective (NUOHUC) as a researcher to assist Historic England’s ‘Women in Shipbuilding’ project. The project works in partnership with NUOHUC; Women’s Engineering Society (WES); Imperial War Museums (IWM); and in collaboration with Remembering the Past, North Tyneside Art Studio and North Tyneside Council. It is funded by the Lloyds Register Foundation. For press reports about the project see the following links: BBC; ITV; Northern Soul; and Cultured North East. Joe writes:

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INSIGHTS Public Lecture: First Responder Memories of the 1988 Lockerbie Disaster

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In this post, Andy Clark, who is a research associate in History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle, discusses his upcoming INSIGHTS Public Lecture based on research that he has led into the aftermath of the Lockerbie Disaster, 1988. The lecture will take place on Thursday December 7th, 2023, at 5:30pm 

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