Page 504 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

1144 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

Figure 1.
Monument
“For the Honor-
able Cross”
in Prijedor

vina (Armija Bosne i Hercegovine, ABiH) and the Croatian Defense Council (Hrvatsko
vijeće odbrane, HVO). In this article, memorials from Prijedor, Mostar and Sarajevo,
which portray three contested memories, are examined.
In Prijedor, a town in northwestern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina which was the
place of some of the worst atrocities against the non-Serb population, there is a central
war monument (Figure 1) to the soldiers of the VRS of the “Defensive-Patriotic War”
(odbrambeno-otadžbinski rat). The 7 meter high cross-shaped monument called “For the
Honorable Cross” (Za krst časni), erected in 2000, was designed by the prominent Serbi-
an sculptor Miodrag Živković, known in Yugoslavia for Partisan war monuments, such
as the one for the Battle of Sutjeska in Tjentište. The memorial complex in Prijedor also
9
has an edifice with the names of 575 soldiers who died called “Stone Flower” (Kameni
cvijet) – the name of the central memorial to the victims of the Second World War con-
centration camp Jasenovac. Here there is a clear reference to the Serb suffering during
the Second World War, a connection that is present also in other memorials. Živković
designed monuments in Brčko, Bjeljina, Derventa, Mrkonjić Grad and Modriča in Re-
publika Srpska. These 4 to 7 meters high memorials, usually placed in central squares,
which makes them easily accessible to the public, tell the official narrative of Republika
Srpska. They are usually in the shape of the cross and some carry the Serbian symbol
with four Cyrillic letters of S (C), that is popularly interpreted as “Only Unity Saves the
Serbs” (Samo sloga Srbina spašava). Živković’s biography speaks about the changes in
the memory policies in the area of former Yugoslavia: the policy of “Brotherhood and
Unity” (Bratstvo i jedinstvo) that glorified the communist joint victory of the Second
World War, evading the crimes conducted between the groups, was replaced by separa-
tist and antagonistic memories of the last war. In these policy changes, historic figures
and events gained new interpretation: Milena Dragičević Šešić argues that monuments
to Draža Mihajlović in Serbia, who for forty years was considered the people’s enemy in
former Yugoslavia, challenged the official history of the communist anti-Fascist Partisan

9 Živković›s web page: miodrag-zivkovic.com/index.htm