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Jul 31, 2023

Marking Territory: How Russian Monuments Dominate a Bosnian Town

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Bos/Hrv/Srp Located

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Bos/Hrv/Srp

Located in Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska, Visegrad is a town that witnessed many mass atrocities during the 1990s war, yet not a single public marker recognising the non-Serb victims exists.

In contrast, every town square and Orthodox cemetery in Republika Srpska hosts monuments to the fallen Bosnian Serb ‘heroes’, and its roadsides are littered with private memorials to Serb soldiers. These memorials are often erected on the very spots where non-Serbs were killed.

While geographically, Visegrad lies at the confluence of the Drina and Rzav rivers in eastern Bosnia, ideologically it is situated at the convergence of Bosnia's divided political memory and its fight over memorialisation. It is a fight that the Bosnian Serbs are winning here, as Visegrad can be said to represent the epicentre of genocide denial and historical erasure in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 1991, the municipality of Visegrad had a population of 21,000, of which 63 per cent identified themselves as Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Then in the spring of 1992, Milan Lukic and his White Eagles, a self-styled Chetnik paramilitary group, came to town.

Sentenced to six life sentences by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY for murder, extermination, cruelty, persecution and inhumane acts, Lukic's numerous crimes in Visegrad include the massacre of thousands of local non-Serbs on the Drina bridge, the killing of women and children in the now infamous Pionirska Street and Bikavac fires, and the rape and murder of hundreds of women at the hotel Vilina Vlas.

Yet not a single public marker exists to commemorate those events, nor to recognise that more than 3,000 Bosniak civilians that were killed in Visagrad from 1992 to 1995.

But the town does have Russian monuments – concrete markers of Moscow's regional foreign policy tactic of destabilisation.

The presence of these Russian monuments in a space devoid of the recognition of wartime atrocities committed against non-Serbs, makes Russia, within the context of the debate over memorialisation and denial in Republika Srpska, an active participant in historical revisionism and genocide denial.

Russia's soft-power foreign policy in the Western Balkans has long sought to exploit nationalist-driven political divides for its own diplomatic gains. In Bosnia, Russia's main tactic has been to legitimise and manipulate pervasive feelings of religious nationalism and victimisation in Republika Srpska to successfully create a client state with minimal direct financial and political investment.

It has accomplished this primarily by using the concept of a ‘Russkiy mir’ (Russian world), an ideology built upon the conflation of ethno-nationalism, religion and politics that is closely connected to the nationalist mythology of a Greater Serbia and Republika Srpska's separatist movement to gain independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

2020 even saw the coining of the phrase ‘Srpski svet’ (‘Serbian world’) as a direct reference and response to Russia's soft-power foreign policy tactic and as a means of highlighting the ideological similarities between the Russian and Serb world views.

As such, the erection of Russian memorials throughout Republika Srpska, many of which are inscribed with Orthodox religious iconography, serves to solidify this Russian-Serb inter-group identity. At the same time, their placement at strategic locations signifies Russia's position of dominance in the region.

They are also a physical manifestation of Russia's policy of quid-pro-quo diplomacy towards Republika Srpska, in which Russia actively supports Republika Srpska's campaign of historical erasure and revisionism (including the glorification of war criminals) in exchange for its support of Russia's foreign policy goals.

This is perhaps best highlighted by Russia's 2015 veto of the UN security council resolution that would have condemned the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide. The veto earned then Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, a plaque in the Republika Srpska city of East Sarajevo with the inscription, "Thanks for the Russian ‘No’".

The Russian Orthodox cross on Grad Hill above Visegrad. Photo: Megan McCullough.

If Bosnian Serbs utilise memorials to show political and cultural dominance by ‘marking their territory’, then the 5.5-metre Russian Orthodox cross towering over Visegrad's landscape conveys a strong message about the hierarchical relationship between Republika Srpska and the Russian Federation.

Situated on Grad hill, the site of Visegrad's ancient origins, and with its steel structure gleaming in the sun, the monument looms heavy over both the town and the Drina River valley below – a location that has been called Bosnia's largest mass grave.

Erected in 2017 on Republika Srpska's Day of Russian Veterans, the 400-kilogramme steel monument's inscription says it is "[dedicated to] the Russian volunteer fighters who died in the battle of Visegrad, Republika Srpska" – three of them, according to the names listed.

The monument's dedication was organised by the Visegrad municipality and the Republika Srpska Veterans’ Organisation, which has been identified by the Foreign Policy Research Institute as a key Republika Srspka NGO in Russia's implementation of its Russkiy Mir project. The organisation serves as pool from which Serb youth are recruited for military and political training, and since 2015, has operated as an official affiliate of a Russian veterans’ organisation called Inheritors of Victory.

Bosnian war victims decried the monument as a glorification of genocide and a symbol of continued aggression towards non-Serbs, and criticised the Russian Federation for its complicity. The Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide and the Movement of Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves issued a joint statement concerning the monument

"All those who are together with the Republika Srpska Army were on the same side and carry the label of a perpetrator of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This ceremony rewarded the… volunteers who were killing innocent victims in Visegrad," the statement said.

The victims included those killed on the historic Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic bridge, located directly beneath Russia's newly-staked position of dominance over the territory.

According to testimonies at the ICTY, during the summer of 1992, the White Eagles paramilitary group conducted daily mass executions of local Bosniaks on the Drina bridge, dumping their bodies into the river below so that the river "was all foamy with blood".

And while bodies began to surface as early as 1992, an investigation in 2010 by the International Commission on Missing Persons uncovered an additional 73 skeletons entombed in the riverbed. It is estimated that nearly 1,000 victims are still unaccounted for, buried under the river's blue-green waters.

Although the bridge was added as an UNESCO site in 2007, the plaque commemorating its inscription makes no mention of the massacres.

The Church of St. Lazar in Visegrad, built on the site of a wartime detention facility. Photo: Megan McCullough.

Over the past decade, Russia has successfully built and funded a network of far-right, ultra-nationalist groups in the Western Balkans who are prepared to carry out covert political operations on behalf of the Kremlin.

It has achieved this goal through both the manipulation of anti-Western sentiment and the development of its ties to the Serbian Orthodox Church, veterans’ organisations and radical nationalist groups, many of which have direct ties to those responsible for committing atrocities during the war. These groups include such Visegrad's Ravna Gora Chetniks.

From the backing of attempted political coups to the running of paramilitary training facilities, Russia can be said to be operating a quasi-shadow foreign policy in the Balkans, with the Kremlin-approved motorcycle group the Night Wolves acting as de facto cultural attachés.

Sanctioned by the US for "kidnapping, assault and close ties to Russia's security services", the Night Wolves, whose self-described mission is to "defend the Russian world", received a grant of $41,000 from the Russian government in 2018 to undertake a "pilgrimage" in the Western Balkans meant to highlight "the shared Orthodox faith of Russia and the region".

Therefore, in addition to functioning as symbols of the unity between Russians and Serbs, Russian dominance and the legitimacy of the Bosnian Serbs’ narrative about the war, they likewise serve as ‘trail markers’ for extremist ‘pilgrims’.

One such marker is a Lady of Port Arthur icon housed in the newly-constructed Serbian Orthodox church in the Andricgrad development in Visegrad. A Serbian folk Disneyland, Andricgrad was built as a tourist attraction in 2014 by the film director Emir Kusturica in honour of the Nobel prize-winning Yugoslav author Ivo Andric.

Positioned on a jetty between the town's two rivers, the church, named in honour of Saint Lazar, is built directly on the site of a sports facility that was used as a detention centre during the war. Similar to those interned at nearby Uzamnica, Bosniak civilians were held there under brutal and inhumane conditions, and were often beaten, raped and tortured.

The inscription on the icon says that the icon was donated in 2013 by "the simple people of Russia" in remembrance of the "Russian volunteer fighters who died defending the Orthodox peoples in the Balkans".

The icon is symbol of religious solidarity meant to fortify Russian-Bosnian Serb relations and made even more significant by the fact that it was given an honoured place in a church built to memorialise, and thus keep alive, the victimisation of Serbs at the hands of the Ottomans during the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, while simultaneously justifying and erasing the victimisation of Bosniaks at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs.

Yet another marker is located in the military graveyard in front of the town's central Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary. Erected in 2011, it is a memorial dedicated to Russian soldiers killed during the Bosnian war.

A tall obelisk into which is carved a Serbian tetragrammic, or ‘fire striker’ cross, the monument's dedication reads, first in Russian and then in Serbian: "In memory of the Orthodox brothers – Russian volunteers who died for Republika Srpska in the Defence of the Fatherland War 1992-1995", with the names and dates of the 34 soldiers listed around the base of the cross.

The church itself welcomes visitors with information about its history posted at the main entrance in three languages: Serbian, English and Russian, signalling the church's popularity as a place of pilgrimage for Russian religious, nationalist and military groups.

The centrality of the monument to the fallen Russian soldiers only further highlights the erasure of other narratives. For while the Russian soldiers’ memorial is prominently displayed in the very centre of town, Bosniak victims of Visegrad's wartime atrocities are relegated to a small, private cemetery on its outskirts.

In 2012, a monument recognising the "victims of the Visegrad genocide" was erected in the Straziste Muslim cemetery in conjunction with the internment of 66 newly exhumed and identified remains. The Republika Srpska authorities ruled that the monument could not contain the word genocide and in 2014 consequently desecrated the cemetery by grinding the ‘offensive’ word off the memorial.

Local authorities sent masked, special unit policemen into the cemetery before dawn to prevent any protests. Their goal was to physically erase the memory of the Visegrad massacres. Since then, families of Bosniak victims have used red lipstick and permanent markers to reinstate the word genocide on the memorial.

Dedication on the Russian cross above Visegrad "to the fallen Russian volunteers and Bosnian Serb Army fighters". Photo: Megan McCullough.

The most overt marker of Russia's backing of far-right nationalist groups is located 22 kilometres south-east of Visegrad at the entrance of the Monastery of St. Nicholas on the Dobrun River, or as it is known to members of the Ravna Gora Chetnik movement, Drazevina.

Built to commemorate General Dragoljub ‘Draza’ Mihailovic, the leader of the WWII Serbian royalist and nationalist guerrilla unit known as the Chetniks, Drazevina has become a place of pilgrimage for Serbian nationalists and the headquarters for the modern right-wing group of the same name.

However, it is not just Serbs who pay homage to Mihailovic and his vision of a ‘Greater Serbia’.

Evidenced by the wooden Russian Orthodox cross placed near the entrance to the compound, Russian nationalist groups such as the Night Wolves have not only visited the Chetnik compound, but have bestowed upon them a symbol of their support, marking the Chetnik movement as ‘one of us’ while simultaneously ‘marking their territory’.

In 2022, the state court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted three members of the Ravna Gora Chetnik group for "inciting ethnic, racial and religious hatred, discord and intolerance" at a 2019 rally in Visegrad in which members, gathering at the town's central square just steps from the bridge over the River Drina, sang "there will be hell, the Drina will be bloody, here come the Chetniks from the Serb mountains".

By actively, albeit covertly, supporting the Chetniks, Russia is hindering post-conflict reintegration and healing in Bosnia by promoting ethnic tensions and instilling fear in a town that saw some of the worst atrocities and human rights violations of the 20th Century – all in the name of achieving its foreign policy goals.

This is why Russia's foreign policy approach towards Republika Srpska is so problematic. By erecting monuments to the fallen Russian soldiers of the Bosnian War, Russia is engaging in an act of selective historical memory that requires the country to align itself with the perpetrators of the worst genocide in modern European history.

Megan McCullough is a researcher for the Bosnian-American Genocide Institute and Education Center and a Development Associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received her MA in International Policy and Development with a Specialization in Conflict Resolution from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

For detailed information about mass grave sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia, see BIRN's database, Bitter Land.

NOTE: This article was amended on February 16, 2022 to clarify that Vitaly Churkin was the Russian ambassador to the UN.