Not My Turn to Die

On September 2, 2008, Balkan Insight published a review of Not My Turn to Die, written by their intern Conor Gaffney, an undergraduate student from the United States.

In the review, Gaffney wrote that “there is no question that Heleta has genuinely forgiven those who imprisoned his family and killed his Serbian neighbors. It is also without doubt that Savo and his family suffered tremendously at the hands of their Bosniak neighbors purely because of their Serb ethnicity.”

However, he says, the book “unwittingly falls into the ideological thought processes that this tale of forgiveness aims to overcome.” Gaffney says that “Savo Heleta’s memoir reminds us not only of the terrible suffering endured on all sides during the Bosnian war, but also that all sides have been transformed into nations, both internally and externally, by the conflict.”

Link to the review: http://balkaninsight.com/en/main/life_and_style/12804/

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A few days after the review was published I received an email from Elizabeth Chung. In her email, Elizabeth said that, after reading the review, she tried to post a comment on Balkan Insight website and give her opinion about the review and the book. To this day, the comment was never published on BalkanInsight.com.

Blogging is a great tool that can help all of us fight the censorship of the mainstream media and those aspiring to be so. Below is Elizabeth’s comment:

I would take issue with some of the points of this review. First of all, Savo Heleta very much covers the points that it was their Bosnian Moslem a/k/a Bosniak neighbors that actually saved them. Instead of giving this equal time in the review, this is not even mentioned.  Instead it is stated that, "Having survived imprisonment and starvation at the hands of their Bosniak neighbors, together with two years of death threats and perennial shelling, Savo and his family finally fled to Serb-controlled territory by swimming down the Drina River." This would lead one to think that Savo Heleta had nothing good to say about his neighbors, which is completely contrary to the story being told.

In fact, when he speaks of extremists, he takes care to speak of individuals behaving in extreme fashions - individuals actually hiding behind or perhaps even better to say, "cloaking themselves" in an ideology or group membership.

If anything Savo's book seeks to break out of the mold of group dynamics and instead speaks about individuals who stood up and did the right thing, as well as other individuals that behaved in totally unacceptable ways.

Furthermore, the parallels made between Savo's book and a conversation on a bus are pretty tenuous at best. Savo would never make such statements and he did not make such statements in the book. Once again, he spoke of individual behavior.

His idea that the war was a continuation of an on-going problem does not throw him back into nationalist thinking; rather he is observing that emerging from this kind of thinking with these elements of thinking in play, is going to make resolutions and reconciliation of the problem more complicated.

It really sounds as if the book was read simply to find things to take exception with and pull out of context.  The idea the Savo Heleta is carrying around some sort of internalized nationalist ideology is ridiculous. 

Furthermore, I think that Savo Heleta's personal journey which continues with his work in Darfur and pursuit of a Masters Degree in Conflict Transformation and Management at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU), with the focus on ethnic conflict, conflict between states, and interstate conflict, specifically in South Africa, Rwanda, and Sudan most likely provides him with a rather large degree of expertise even in viewing historical perceptions that can drive conflicts.

In fact, the trend of viewing conflict without historical perspective is undergoing some serious re-examination. It is not necessary to "sign on" to these perceptions, but failure to acknowledge that various actors are carrying out policies or pandering to these perceptions is an important factor to be taken into account, particularly during attempts at mediating these types of conflicts.