{"id":232910,"date":"2025-07-16T14:41:35","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T18:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=232910"},"modified":"2025-07-16T14:41:35","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T18:41:35","slug":"archiving-for-justice-truth-and-memory-unpacking-the-baggage-of-what-went-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/07\/archiving-for-justice-truth-and-memory-unpacking-the-baggage-of-what-went-before\/","title":{"rendered":"Archiving for Justice, Truth, and Memory: Unpacking the Baggage of What Went Before"},"content":{"rendered":"

Justice, truth, and memory lie at the heart of what it means for a society to rebuild after suffering from genocide and mass atrocity.\u00a0 Justice that holds perpetrators accountable and attempts to repair the harm that was done to victims and their communities.\u00a0 Truth that establishes the facts of what occurred.\u00a0 Memory that is a faithful reflection of that truth.\u00a0 These are the tools we use to stabilize, heal, and rehabilitate a post-atrocity society.\u00a0 All require the courage to deal with, rather than ignore, a past legacy of massive human rights abuses.<\/p>\n

Achieving justice, truth, and memory does not happen quickly or come easily.\u00a0 To deal with the past is to open a wound that may be more comfortably, at least in the short term, left ignored.\u00a0 Long term, however, to let the wound fester is to invite the recurrence of another, perhaps even more grievous, conflict-laden future.<\/p>\n

This is precisely why UConn\u2019s internationally recognized International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Digital Archives\u00a0<\/a>are such a rich and important resource.\u00a0 Established by the United Nations in 1993, the ICTY was the first international war crimes court of its kind since Nuremberg, and it focused extensively on investigating the atrocities committed during the Yugoslav Wars of 1992-95.\u00a0 The ICTY Digital Archives \u2013 the result of an ongoing collaboration between Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs<\/a>,\u00a0the UConn Libraries<\/a>, the Connecticut Digital Archive<\/a>, and individual scholars, witnesses, and others involved in the tribunal \u2013 seek to make the work of the tribunal accessible to researchers, educators, students, and others.<\/p>\n

Under the leadership of Predrag Doj\u010dinovi\u0107, who formerly worked for the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICTY, and Aida Grada\u0161\u010devi\u0107, a graduate of UConn\u2019s master\u2019s program in human rights, a team of UConn student researchers have helped curate ten unique and diverse collections related to documents, translations, photographs, expert reports, records, and other materials from the ICTY.<\/p>\n

For Doj\u010dinovi\u0107, the ICTY Digital Archive \u201cstands as a powerful and enduring monument to justice, truth, and remembrance, a meticulously curated legacy uniting victims\u2019 voices, expert insights, and judicial records into an unassailable historical testament. By opening this profound repository to the world, we affirm that justice transcends the courtroom: it lives in public memory, breathes through open dialogue, and endures in our shared commitment to truth, accountability, and reconciliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Srebrenica
Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery, July 11, 2007, James Waller<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The newest addition to UConn\u2019s ICTY Digital Archives, the Srebrenica Genocide Archives Collection<\/a>, is particularly timely as July 2025 marks 30 years since the genocide in Srebrenica occurred.\u00a0 Standing as the gravest crime committed on European soil since the Second World War, over 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) men and boys, despite the presence of United Nations peacekeepers, were systematically murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.\u00a0 The bodies of the victims \u2013 three generations of males, including some as young as 10 years of age \u2013 were then dumped into mass graves or thrown into the Drina River.\u00a0 To conceal the extent of the massacre, Bosnian Serbs later scattered the remains of many of the victims in secondary or tertiary mass graves.\u00a0 To date, the remains of nearly 1,000 of the Srebrenica victims have yet to be found.<\/p>\n

Alongside official court materials, the Srebrenica Genocide Archives Collection includes a wider range of sources: scholarly articles, books, films, podcasts, images, and other media that continue to tell the story of Srebrenica and trace its enduring impact three decades later.\u00a0 The collection is designed to evolve over time, growing through continued research and contributions to ensure that the memory of Srebrenica remains active, accessible, and instructive for generations to come.\u00a0 This collection is particularly crucial as denial of the Srebrenica genocide, along with glorification of convicted war criminals, remains painfully prevalent in Serb political and social discourse throughout the region.<\/p>\n

In reflecting on the events he survived in the former Yugoslavia, the late poet Goran Simic captured the importance of projects like the ICTY Digital Archives: \u201cDealing with the past will not be easy, but it is essential.\u00a0 Dealing with our own past by bringing closure and offering justice for all, perpetrators and victims, is the only right way.\u00a0 This path will not remove crimes from history.\u00a0 It will not repair souls that have been torn apart.\u00a0 But it will offer them the option to move on, and future generations will be able to live without the baggage of what went before.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Waller, Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages & Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, UConn<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflections on the importance of the newest addition to UConn\u2019s ICTY Digital Archives, the Srebrenica Genocide Archives Collection. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":232912,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2318,2312,2331],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2350],"class_list":["post-232910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dodd-impact","category-hri","category-human-rights-practice"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 11:08:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232910"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238549,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232910\/revisions\/238549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/232912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232910"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=232910"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=232910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}