We survived and told our stories Guest: Jasminko Halilovic

Hello and welcome back to the third episode of We Can Find A Way in 2024. My name is Idil Elveris. This is the sixth season in this podcast about conflict resolution. We Can Find A Way pioneers a culture change in handling conflict because conflict is everywhere. We Can Find A Way is also the only bilingual podcast that addresses conflict on an international scale. Today, I will talk to Jasminko Halilovic from BIH.  He will introduce us to the story of war childhood and how the collection first turned into a book and then into a museum project telling the story of children in war. He will also discuss how this platform contributed to healing through storytelling in the Balkans. He will describe how he has been able to talk to people from all over the world who went through a childhood in war including Japan, Ukraine and Syria. Let us now move to the interview that Jasminko and I had on 13th March 2024.

IE: Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. Your museum, or the War Childhood Museum, is about storytelling. Can you please tell us the story?

JH: Well, the War Childhood museum is also a museum of objects. But in the case of museum, objects are there mostly to illustrate the stories which we collect. And the stories which we collect are parts of a collection which was created before the museum even existed. So basically now, already 14 years ago in 2010, I started collecting memories of war from my generation. I was a child during the Bosnian war in 1990s, and I always wanted to do something what would preserve the story of my generation. After the war, in our post conflict country, we had hundreds and hundreds of projects about the war. And these projects were capturing the war from so many different perspectives. Soldiers would have their projects; journalists would have their projects; politicians would have their projects, like many different people. But not so much, from the children's perspective. We did have a couple of individual diaries, for example, Zlata's diary, which became famous around the world. But there were not many platforms where anyone who was a child during the war could tell their story. And this was where my intervention was meant to be. And this was my basic plan to fill that gap, to fix that. What I thought is unjust in the documentation of the war and to open up an opportunity for my generation to also share their memories.

So that's how the project started. And it didn't start as a museum project, started as a book project. I made a website, and I asked people to share their memories. I asked the question: what was the war childhood for you? And I allowed only 160 characters for answers. So, like, tweets or text messages. Hundreds, of people responded to this. Later, thousand people responded, and they were sharing some difficult, some sad, but also some beautiful memories in this very short format. At that time, 2010-11, it was still the time when we just started to understand that our attention span is shrinking and that we prefer short formats. So I think the concept of the book, the concept of this mosaic of the short memories, was actually very timely and well chosen. After collecting these memories, I started editing them into the book, and the book ended up being that collection of these short memories.

Something what I did not expect and what actually resulted later in the War Childhood Museum is two things. First, the community was created around the book. I thought, okay, people will send their short memory, and it's a done deal for them. But people did not do only that. They started promoting the project. They started talking about it. They started sending me additional materials. Some of them started objecting this concept. They said: “you limited it to 160 characters. But it's important for me. I want to tell more”. And they would send me ten pages long emails. And I was not ready for this. I was not trained to do this kind of research or documentation work. I was even not mentally ready to be, support people who started sharing. So I was like something I did not expect. And this was one realization for me when I understood, basically that people have so much to share and that they need to share.

The second thing was that people did not send only text. They sent images of different materials. They sent scans of their letters, of diaries, of photographs. They started sending me objects. And I understood that people very often had to connect their memories to physical objects, to personal belongings, to mementos from the board. Then I started thinking, could there be something more than book? Because, you know, book, you can keep adding sections, you can keep adding pages, you can keep adding materials to the book. But there is a certain common sense. You cannot endlessly keep expanding the book project. So I did expand it a little bit. I added one section, which I did not plan from the beginning where I put some of these, where I showed some of the materials they shared.

I started thinking, so many people who didn't even learn about this project, so many people outside of my city and country, outside of this context who might also feel like sharing something. And I started thinking about these objects, the power of objects. And this is why, before even book was published in 2012, I wrote the first concept note for the war childhood museum. And in this concept note I described this dream of mine to create this place that would preserve these stories long term, that would tell these stories long term, and that would serve this community long term. I have written this concept note and just left it aside and didn't share it with anyone, basically, because after putting it together, I understood that I know nothing about museums. You know the book project is a hobby side project for me. I have a different background completely: business and finances. How do I do this? So I just put it aside. I gave myself time to finish the book. And then after the book was published, year later, 2013, now three years to this project, this was another important milestone for me, because it was the first time. Now, after three years of work, I needed to present this book to this community and to see what they say and how they feel. And, this was, for me, like verification, if I am capable to deliver in line with these people's expectations. And for me, this was very important because I understood during the work of the book that for many of these people, this project is more important than for myself. And they did have a large and big tough expectation, some of them.

But after the book was published, the reception of the book, the way it was received, was really overwhelmingly positive. I think people in my city and my country, they accepted a book, as a kind of a testament to the experience of our generation. And we had a book launch with 1000 people. Media wrote, it's the biggest book launch in the history of the city. People came together, and not to celebrate the project or the book, but to celebrate the fact that we survived and that we are capable to tell our whole stories. Even at that moment, book project already yields some positive impact. There were like complete examples I tell just very briefly one short story: I received a phone call just few days before the book launch. And the phone call was from the mother of one of the contributors to the book. And she said, I'm calling you to thank you because you helped my child to face her experiences and her past. And then later I understood that this person, she was wounded during the Bosnian war in Saravo. She was nine years old. She left the town, she left the country to find treatment. First Croatia settled in Germany. And she never wanted to come back to her city. And she was 27 when the book was published. So two thirds of her life, 18 years, she was outside of her city. And she would went through the Bosnia to go to Croatian seaside, she would drive next to Sarajevo, but she didn't want to come back. And she came back because of the book. She came back to visit the book lounge. It was the first time. Then she kept coming back.

So these kind of small stories, there were many of them. They helped me to realize that there is a strong potential to positively influence people's lives if you provide that kind of unity, if you provide that kind of platform, if you provide that kind of opportunity. And I understood there is a healing potential in this project. This was for me enough to start considering, to devote my life to this cause. And I made this decision year later, in 2014, when I decided to commit myself full time to create this museum. So that's my story.

IE: The cause, much more beyond you, created a community of its own through objects and through stories. And that's the strength of the stories and objects actually, completely went beyond what you presumed or thought or could imagine, I guess?

JH: Yes, exactly. And still, I think even today, after, for me now, it's 14 years since I'm working on the project and ten years since I'm working, let's say, full time for the museum to happen and to succeed. Even today, I think neither me or other people around the museum, we don't fully understand and grasp the power of these objects and these stories and this collection and this community. And every day, we learn something new. And every day we are again and again surprised how impactful an collection can be. And I just discussed a few days ago, now, of course now, museum is an international organization. We do exhibitions and programs in ten countries at least. And we work with dozens of thousands of visitors and students every year. In some of our programs, teachers and students from different countries, they take part in our programs. And, recently, we had one teacher training for 50 teachers from different countries in Europe, many of them from our region. And we had teachers from Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia.

And there are still complexities in our region, post conflict complexities: denial, lack of trust, lack of communication. There is no political will to connect people. There is only strong nationalist political determination to keep dividing people. So, working in this context on a peace building or reconciliation or peace education initiatives, it's not easy. But just a few days ago, I was discussing, we got announced visit of school from Serbia for the first time. And this is not something that would be possible if you would rely on decision makers or ministries of education because they are still against these kind of study trips. But this happened because students and teachers insisted to come to Sarajevo, visit the museum. And why they insisted is because they used some of our educational materials, the activity plans based on our collection. They found it online. They use it in their classroom. So there is a certain power that this object holds, and this power is big enough to overcome the powers of nationalistic political agendas. I just had this conversation with my friends, colleagues from Serbian civil society, and they said, we thought this is unimaginable, but now we see it's possible. And now we are talking, if we can create a platform of teachers for peace in the region to amplify this impact. But I'm just telling you now these small stories which can tell you that this collection can change the way people think and feel about things.

IE: You're saying it kind of works with Serbia but what about the Republica Serpska in Bosnia? Do you also have connections there?

JH: Yes. So everything the museum does today, you can look at least on two levels. One is individual level, and another is collective level. So we always ask two questions: what we can do for people, for citizens, for those who engage with us. And the second question, what we can do for the society. For people, as I described this example with some of our contributors, the museum contributes to this healing process, and we have contributors to our collection from across our country, including like all parts of the country. And this shows that, creation of this kind of collection can bring people together, can create, one, has the potential to create a more inclusive narrative about our past. So that's on the individual level.

For community level or society level, there are some conditions and there are some limitations which can basically determine how much you can do. The best example in this is our peace education activities between connecting schools. In order to work with schools, you need permissions from ministries of education, and these are regional, and we don't have these permissions from all ministries, because some ministries see any peace related work as a threat, unfortunately still. So this is, for example, limitation, limiting our impact in some parts of the country, including Republic of Srpska, which you mentioned. However, we do believe that the mere existence of the museum, the individuals visiting the museum, the positive media coverage we receive across the country, the stories we tell online, the online workshops we offer, where we do have people from across the country, we believe that all of this as a package is still contributing and is maybe showing the path, and maybe we cannot be everything we want today, but we will be here. Politics change. So we believe that long term, we will hand out impact equally across the whole country.

IE: You have expanded the work of the museum beyond your country. What prompted that?

JH: Well, after the book was published, the book started being translated in different languages. And one of the first languages the book was translated to was Japanese, was published in Japan by major Japanese publishers. So I went to Japan to do a book tour and present the book in different places. When I was there, I had opportunity to talk with survivors of the second World War in Japan, including Hiroshima. Some of them read the book, and some of them told me that they could easily identify themselves with the memories from the book. And I remind you, the memories in the book were from Bosnian children from 1990s. And these are now people 70 years old, 80 years old, who were children in 1940s.

So this was, another push, because I understood this is a universal experience shared by so many across the world. I knew if I would ever want to do something about this after the book, it should never be limited to the borders of my country. So, basically, even in the first concept note of the museum in 2012, I wrote this already, but later I was only convinced more and more that this should be the way to go. And, this is what we have done. After creating our Bosnian collection, having first temporary exhibitions in the country, and opening permanent museum 2017, we immediately started to expand our collection internationally. The first project was with Syrian child refugees in Lebanon. Then we started working in Eastern Ukraine. Many people don't know, but the war in Ukraine did not start in 2022. It started 2014 with Donbas and Crimea. So we started working in the east of the country to document experiences of some of the children affected by the war in Donbas. So also other contexts and other places, through networks of researchers, partner organizations. And we started expanding our collection. Naturally, after this we also started, as our collection was becoming international, it also was becoming more relevant for different groups and audiences. So not only for Bosnians anymore, but now many different audiences. So we also started receiving more invitations for exhibitions. And then as we started exhibiting internationally, we started connecting to more audiences. So then there was also growing interest for our peace education work internationally. So that's how we extended this as well. So today, museum has a couple of offices, a couple of countries, and we deliver our programs to audiences, mostly Europe but also outside.

IE: Anything you would like to add?

JH: We are still expanding our collection. Now we have more than 6000 objects from 20 different armed conflicts. Starting with the Second World War, holding some of the contemporary conflicts, we receive new objects and stories all the time. This year, we have first time objects and stories from Myanmar, Thailand. So, basically, we are committed to this goal to create world's most comprehensive collection on children in conflicts. And we believe our collection is already one of the world's major collections on this topic. But we will continue working to include as many stories and experiences as possible from all major armed conflicts. Because we think that when these stories are brought together, that they are even more powerful than on their own. And, this is why we believe our collection is unique and important resource for the generations to come.

IE: Yeah, you have created a voice for children, basically. It's pretty amazing. Thank you very much for your work.

JH: Thank you for the opportunity to talk and I hope you come back

IE: I will

JH: It's a little bit different now, but you visited, so I hope.

IE: Jasminko Halilovic was born in 1988 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He holds a master degree in financial management and he is a PhD candidate researching museum management. He is the Founder and CEO of the War Childhood Museum — the world's only museum exclusively focused on the experience of childhood affected by war — which has been awarded the Council of Europe Museum Prize under the European Museum of the Year scheme.

Jasminko was a keynote speaker at various museum, peacebuilding or entrepreneurship conferences in more than 10 countries. He is regularly invited to present or teach at universities around the world and contributed to various media.