DAIDŽIN PRSTEN

 The journalist and film-maker enquires as to the fate of her uncle Abdurrahman Filipović, who was murdered in August 1992 during the Yugoslav Wars, most likely by pro-Serbian militias. Together with fellow Muslim Bosnians in Kalinovik, the birthplace of the Serbian general and war criminal Ratko Mladić. He is celebrated here; sometimes his portraits hang, in people's apartments, next to those of Josip Broz Tito, the founder and long-time president of the communist multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia. The alleged perpetrators and those under whose flag the crimes were committed show little by way of remorse. "Braco", as Abdurrahman is called here, was very nice, everyone agrees. He worked as a doctor in the health centre and helped everyone. The director and niece confronts her interlocutors with the question as to why he was killed - and receives either evasive responses or no answers at all. A high-ranking politician in the Republika Srpska - the predominantly Serb-populated part of Bosnia and Herzegovina - talks his way out of it, saying that "foreigners" committed the crimes. In 1941, the Filipović family helped save local Serbs from advancing fascist Croatian Ustaša units. "We will honour the Filipović family forever," they said afterwards. 51 years later, during the Bosnian War, there was no sign of this anymore.

Text: Bernd Buder

07.11.2024 | 15:00 | Kammerbühne (original version with English subtitles + simultaneous translation into German)