Our tour guide, Emina, today was wonderful; she knows so much about the history of the region, she is a kind, sensitive human being, and she is a war survivor herself. She si my age, so she was 15 during the war. She spoke to us about her experiences and about the experiences of her family during the time when they were separated and she was in prison with part of her family under Chetnik (Serb) control.
Someone asked her if it helps her to talk about it or is it just brings up bad memories, and she said it helps her very much. She also said that many tour groups do not want to hear about the war or her experiences and some people have even responded by countering what she knows to be true (because she lived through it) with phrases like, "well It wasn't that way at all... I was in Belgrade at the time and really it was like this... in Bosnia." So she said she was grateful to have a tour like us who were really interested in hearing about the war, about her experiences, and who believed her without trying to come up with our own version of what happened.
She said something that really changed my perceptions of women in this region. I have often been confused and even upset by the degree to which women here focus on their looks, spending lots of money on clothes, shoes, and bags... always having perfect makeup and hair. I thought this was some kind of overidentification with what i would consider to be anti-female/unnatural body standards and hiding behind makeup. But Emina was talking about how people survived the war by fighting in small ways since they had not even 1 single tank to fight against the Serb-run Yugoslav National Army--which had been 6th army in the world for weapons at the start of the war.
Emina said during the war, the women wore makeup and refused to be brought down to a lower standard of living. She said, "we fight in this way."
With these 5 words, she revolutionized my perspective and corrected many if my assumptions about the underlying reasons why these women feel it is important to look the way they do. It is not an attempt to conform to "Western" commercial standards of beauty or to prove their image to the world as a modern nation as I previously thought. It is actually a statement of power that the women here cannot be made ugly, dehumanized, and made to feel unimportant. They have claimed their right to remain as they were before the war: a cosmopolitan people who take great pride in looking well.
The following picture is an offensive thing that one of the presenters showed as a slide. It was written by the Dutch peacekeepers who were stationed in Bosnia supposedly to protect the women (and children and men), which they did not do. instead of intervening while women were raped and men were shot and children were mutilated, they spent their time scrawling cynical statements like this, insulting and further dehumanizing the Bosniak women.
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