Writing together

Writing together is a pretty hard task. When our group first met, we didn’t really know how to organize this work. All the talks we had in this project made us realized we all had a pretty unequal knowledge about what happened in Srebrenica. Therefore, our first instinct was to take time individually to express in a paragraph what we discovered through this exchange and how we feel about getting to know each other. These paragraphs are the middle development of our article. This first step enabled us to get some material. Putting all these individual parts together made us see what common themes and questions were coming out of this work. From that point, we were able to write together an introduction and a conclusion that could embrace the content of the article and give it a logical direction. Finally, this article somehow symbolizes how, from all these individualities and with good communication, we can build something together, which is, according to us, the way to build peace. 

The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. During the war many crimes were committed, like massacres, killing of civilians, rape and genocide. One of the most iconic parts of the Bosnian war is the Srebrenica genocide. Starting on 11th of July in 1995, the Army of Republika Srpska and another paramilitary group killed over 8000 Bosniak and Croat men and boys, while the women were raped, abused and banished. The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia ruled it as a genocide in 2004. Also, the International Court of Justice ruled Serbia guilty of failing to prevent the genocide thus breaching international law. As a trinational group who took part in an intercultural project about the importance of remembering based on the History of Srebrenica, we produced together this small article. We decided to confront our points of view; therefore, our texts appear separately. The similarities and differences of experiences and knowledge about the subject are highlighted by the diversity of our cultural background, as Bosnian, German and French young people. This confrontation enabled us to write together common parts, as an introduction and a conclusion, showing what we learned during this exchange.