Boeklancering: Zwarte Zomer

The summer of 1995 was the one of Europe’s darkest summers. In that bloody hot summer, the Dutch United Nations peacekeeping battalion was sent to protect the people of Srebrenica, during the Bosnian civil war. When the Serb forces took the town, they negotiated with the Dutchbat to hand over the people to them, assuring that they will be safe. 

In a period of the next few days nearly 8,400 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. The International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague declared the events an act of genocide in 2004 and Kofi Annan called it the worst crime to be committed on European soil since the end of the Second World War. 

Theatre and film director tea Tupajić, originally from Sarajevo and a survivor of a Bosnian war, grew up with images of the Dutchbat and with questions: Who were those young men and women? What made them go into the war that wasn't theirs? Why did they leave? In 2017 she came to The Netherlands, led intimate conversations with dozens of veterans. Their stories where as brave as they were honest. She listened even when the truth was painful and created the performance DARK NUMBERS, that was produced by Frascati Producties and toured both across The Netherlands as well as internationally and film Darkness There and Nothing More, which premiered at IDFA 2021 deserving nominations for Best First Feature and Best Dutch Film.

This evening, she will present her book Zwarte zomer, in which she poetically strings together the stories of six veterans into a moving polyphonic choir in which victims, perpetrators and heroes merge into one another. Accompanied by the veterans themselves reading their personal stories perhaps for the last time and reflected by the journalist and author Chris Keulemans on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, the evening will search for the ways art can give answers to deep, personal questions juridical processes never gave. How can it contribute to writing history? 

Srebrenica is undoubtedly one of the crucial wounds of the recent Dutch history. In the spirit of learning from the past to shape the future in these uncertain times, the evening will look at the lessons to be learned so that the history doesn't repeat itself.