Donji Vakuf 1992–1995

Through 1992 the Bosniak villages of the municipality, among them Sokolina, were attacked, and the population driven from the upper Vrbas. The renaming of Donji Vakuf to "Srbobran" belongs to the same family of acts as the wartime renaming of Foča to "Srbinje": ethnic cleansing pursued not only in flesh and stone but in language, seeking to erase the toponymic evidence of a community's centuries of presence. For three years the town existed under this imposed name, its mosques destroyed, its Bosniaks scattered. Its liberation in September 1995 restored the name and opened the long, partial process of return.

The politics of the name

The renaming of conquered towns — Donji Vakuf to "Srbobran," Foča to "Srbinje" — is a small but revealing technology of ethnic cleansing. A name is the most portable form of memory; to change it is to claim that the place was always, and only, Serb, and that the expelled were never truly there. Such acts demonstrate that the campaign aimed not merely at the removal of people but at the rewriting of history itself — the manufacture of a past to justify the engineered present. The restoration of the old names after 1995 was, correspondingly, an early act of historical justice.

The reversible and the irreversible

Donji Vakuf is also one of the cases where the military outcome of the war reversed the cleansing, at least territorially: the town was retaken, the name restored, and return became possible. This distinguishes it from the eastern enclaves, where the cleansing was sealed by genocide and the demographic transformation made permanent. The contrast is instructive: it shows that the permanence of ethnic cleansing was not a law of nature but a function of who held the ground when the guns fell silent — and it underscores how much, at Srebrenica and across the Podrinje, was lost precisely because the ground was never retaken.