What is recovered

Saidin Salkic is a survivor of Bosnia's 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Salkic was interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Radio National in July 2007. The interviewer asked Salkic to tell him about the genocide: 'What can you remember about that?' (ABC Radio National). Salkic cited memories of the smell of his father's jumper and of the flowers growing in his mother’s garden. The interviewer interrupted him, asking for a more chronological description of the events of the genocide itself. Salkic responded that it was not possible to answer the question in such a concise, easily archivable manner, that 'you can't really bundle your memories like that' (ABC Radio National). Listening to this interview, I sat waiting for a neat 'survivor sound-bite' that I could neatly insert into this paper. It didn't happen. I turned off the radio thinking that I had learned nothing of the genocide that took place in Srebrenica. In listening to a survivor---an eye witness---there is a sense that he, of all people, should be able to tell the chronology, the facts of the event; of who did what to whom and why. Yet what is learned---what Salkic's testimony-without-testimony spoke of and explained---is the most important thing: loss.