The Pivotal Role of Community Liaisons in Survivor-Centred Work

On October 11, SCVN Media Director Raey Costain met with Ajnura Akbaš who is supporting the Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster as a community liaison. Ajnura works at the Muzej Ratnog Djetinjstva/War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, an institution focused on the stories of children who have experienced wars and their enduring impact worldwide.

Ajnura spoke about her academic background and her work as a research coordinator for the War Childhood Museum, providing insight into how the museum works with survivors and their stories. As a firsthand witness to the SCVN research process as it has unfolded in the Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster, Ajnura was also able to share her perspective on visual methodologies, the importance of gathering in spaces where atrocities occurred, and what she has learned by working with survivors.

Ajnura has been supporting Almasa’s story with graphic artist Anneli Furmark and Research Cluster Co-Leads Sabine Rutar and Franziska Zaugg.

Raey: Thank you for meeting with me today. Can you give me a little bit of background on your role with the War Childhood Museum in connection to the work that you’re doing with Anneli and her recent trip to Sarajevo?

Ajnura: I work as a research coordinator at the War Childhood Museum. I’ve been with the Museum since 2019. I started working there just after getting my Master’s in history at Royal Holloway in London. My plan was to go back to Sarajevo and do a little bit of volunteering or an internship before starting my PhD. And then I just really fell in love with the mission of the museum and what they were doing. And so I started there on this very short term plan working with visitors, and then I basically never left after 2019.

My role changed a little bit over the years but what I do now is mostly coordinating research projects that the museum is conducting all around the world, documenting stories, objects, and oral history interviews with people who have experienced war childhood globally. So that’s the museum part.

I did eventually start my PhD, so I’m currently travelling between London and Sarajevo. I’m in my final year right now and I’m doing that at LSE in the Department of Gender Studies.

I started working with Anneli recently, and Almasa is our museum participant. She became part of the collection in, I think, 2020, and yeah, this last year we’ve started working with the SCVN team and Anneli, Franziska, and Sabine. We all met in person in Sarajevo last year. And so that was kind of the initial stage of us beginning to plan the project in terms of getting Anneli and Almasa together, having them get to know each other, and most of all for Almasa to start telling her story.

Raey: When you say Almasa became part of your collection, what does that mean?

Ajnura: It means that she donated her personal story to the museum. Her story, accompanied by the memory of an object, is part of our collection, and we have used it in our exhibitions and in our educational workshops. She also recorded an oral history interview for the museum, as part of a joint project between our museum and the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. We exhibit excerpts from those interviews in our permanent exhibition, but also sometimes in our traveling exhibitions as well.

Raey: You mentioned that you were part of getting Anneli and Almasa together, can you expand on your specific role with the SCVN project?

Ajnura: So from the very beginning, our role was (when I say our I mean the museum, and I am acting on behalf of the War Childhood Museum), there was a role of liaison and research support. Almasa being our contributor and our collection participant, we already had very good relationships established with her and so we kind of made sure that Almasa had all the necessary information she needs about the SCVN project, about the methodology, and I think it’s really important that someone is there present who speaks the local language so that she feels more comfortable.

Last year, when Anneli and Franziska and Sabine came to Sarajevo, we made sure to go to Srebrenica with them, to introduce them to Almasa. I also coordinate meetings between Anneli and Almasa and have been doing that for about a year. They initially met in person and then continued online, I think we’ve had about seven or eight interviews so far over Zoom. And then on Anneli’s last visit to Sarajevo we worked with the film crew, coordinating everything regarding the trip in terms of getting the date set and accommodation and all the logistical things but also making sure that Almasa can communicate her boundaries to me and that I can then make sure that the team is aware of what we can or cannot ask or do, or what location Almasa feels the most comfortable recording in, or what the options are in terms of what’s possible with filming and so on.

So that’s the main part of what I’ve been doing with the project, making sure that Almasa as a survivor has the support she needs, and that she can check in with me about any kind of concerns she might have about the process or about the interviews themselves and that means I was there for her as a support. But we haven’t had any kind of issues with the team, and Anneli and Almasa, in particular, have been wonderful to work with.

That’s something I feel very privileged to have witnessed, is how their relationship developed over time. From that first meeting, when Anneli came to Srebrenica to this last meeting in person where you could really see how that relationship blossomed and now they’ve become really good friends in that time span.

Raey: You said that one of the things you were facilitating was ensuring that Almasa understands the SCVN methodology, creating the graphic novel and film. Are these kinds of methods something you were familiar with already?

Ajnura: I haven’t worked with the graphic novel method before, but I have worked with different kinds of visual methodologies and alternative archival methodologies through the museum. Our main method is childhood material culture, storytelling, and oral history but we have had a number of projects where the group of people we worked with was specific and we knew that we needed to adjust our methodology and offer an alternative language for people to communicate their life stories in a way that is not straightforward. We have experimented with embodied methodologies, with body mapping, with collages, with different kinds of artistic workshops and ways for people to express or illustrate their memories without having to sit in a studio and record a two hour long interview. And so I already had a kind of affinity, but also I guess a feeling of closeness, to alternative methodologies for documenting people’s life stories. And one thing I really appreciated, just from the position that I was in during this project, is witnessing Almasa’s reaction to the first drawings, seeing how important it is to her, and what it brings out of her. I think there is a value in these drawings being Anneli’s interpretation of Almasa’s words on the one hand, but also in Almasa to see their symbolic value, seeing a visual representation of her very, very earliest childhood memories of playing with her friends or of important moments in her story later on.

But it was really a special moment for me seeing her light up at some of those drawings.

Raey: That’s wonderful. I think one of the things that comes up a lot in talking about this project is that it really does depend on those relationships. And while we do, of course, have institutional relationships that help set those up, there’s no predicting if people are going to become friends or friendly or not. And so it sounds like you really had a close up view of that kind of research relationship unfolding in this project.

Ajnura: Yes, definitely, and we as a team, I feel that we were quite careful and cautious from the very beginning, in terms of whether Almasa would feel comfortable enough to share her story in full. This is not the first time for her to share her story. It was about whether we would be able to develop that level of trust between the two of them. I appreciate that the entire team were careful and that they wanted to respect the process of Almasa getting to know Anneli. And you can really see the difference in how Almasa narrates her story in the first interview and then in the last, because she feels more comfortable. It’s a kind of familiarity that comes with time.

And I also really appreciate how Anneli didn’t come into the project with preconceived notions of what she would hear. But she is hearing it all from Almasa and narrating it as such. And I think this work is really valuable. Especially from the perspective of the museum, because we work with war childhood history, it’s really important to see people whose stories are not normally included in histories and to have them writing themselves back in. And especially when it comes to the Bosnian war and the Srebrenica genocide, which is the topic of Almasa’s story, official stories are often about, you know, statistics and numbers, or they are about the militaries and politicians and journalists. They are rarely about children, who obviously had no say in whether the war would start or not but suffered multiple consequences of it. And so I think it’s really important that Almasa’s story is being documented, and that it will stay as important archival material.

Raey: You said that a big moment for this project was the team all coming together and meeting with Almasa. But you were also meeting in the place where the story unfolds. What do you see as the need or impact of gathering at the location where the story is set?

Ajnura: On the one hand, I think physical places, landscapes, those memorials that we visited, they hold stories as well. And especially for Almasa, who narrated part of her story that happened in that place, and she was speaking about the events while standing there, I think it encapsulates more than just Almasa’s personal story, but also the story of the place. That’s one part. But the other, of course, was that I think it adds another emotional element to the story because I know, having been there, it was a lot more emotionally laborious for Almasa to narrate some parts of the story while being there. And so I think there should be a recognition of that as well, that being in that physical space brings additional memories, and that we are triggered by our senses, by seeing things, touching things. So I think the value is in having those different kinds of historical materials added to the story, while at the same time not being the easiest task for the survivor, considering that it is the space where a lot of difficult things happened.

Raey: In terms of emotional labour, it can be very challenging to recount an experience, but it is also challenging to be on the other side of that conversation, to be somebody receiving that. Can you speak a little bit about how you take care of yourself? Or how the museum supports people who work there to care for themselves when engaging with these kinds of stories?

Ajnura: All museum staff who work with survivors are trained by psychologists to learn about techniques on how to protect ourselves, what kinds of practices we need to include in our daily lives, so that we can take care of our mental health. And we know to set some boundaries, even when it is difficult to do so.

I personally don’t really like talking about how it affects me, because I think it can never measure up to the emotional labour it takes for the participants to narrate or recall certain memories. I feel just incredibly privileged to be able to work at a museum where people entrust us with their memories and personal histories, but also with some of their most precious objects from their war childhoods.

What comes to mind when you ask that question is Almasa, because Almasa works at the Srebrenica Memorial Center in an area where she, as a child, survived genocide. And we’ve had some conversations about this, and I was really inspired by what she said. She said, and obviously we are aware of this as well, that you never really overcome trauma. You just learn how to live with it. And through her work at the memorial, through education, through advocacy, through different kinds of constructive ways of how to speak about the past, she’s able to reframe it so as to highlight positive aspects of it, or to imagine a possibility of a future in a place where atrocities happened. So I think there is an element of hope there, that being in those places, or working in or around those locations where atrocities happened, that you are reframing it through different kinds of activities you do there, and we hope to do that at the War Childhood Museum as well. But I think it’s even more relevant to what Almasa is doing at the Srebrenica Memorial.

Raey: Thank you for speaking on that. You mentioned that you’re finishing your PhD now. Do you plan on continuing with this kind of work after your degree?

Ajnura: My academic work has always been kind of inspired by the things I’m curious about. So through just my own research and experiences, and so on. And it has been kind of always tied to history and to Bosnia as a place where I grew up and the work at the museum really encapsulates all these elements that I really like about research. We are still very much embedded in the community. The museum is actually a place that exists to gather and to serve the community, so I never feel that I am out of touch with the world. You are always kind of embedded in it, but at the same time, there is this research side of things that allows me to develop methodologies, to meet other academics and researchers, to learn from them, or for me to teach them about what we do at the museum.

I would hope that in the next steps I continue working for the museum. We are still a relatively young institution. The museum opened in 2017, and there are a lot of things that we haven’t explored yet when it comes to the potentials of the work. A lot of interesting and bigger projects are yet to come. I’m just looking forward to being part of that, and hopefully advancing in my academic side of things as well.