Zajednički Život

"Common life" in Sarajevo the winter before the siege. Artwork by TRIO

“Multi-ethnic” is the term, beloved by Western mourners, used to describe Sarajevo and also Bosnia before the 1990s. But, Robert Donia suggests, Sarajevo is not so “multi” as it is something common that is shared:

“Before the early 1990s Sarajevans would not have described their city using any of the “multi” terms embedded in [UN] Resolution 824. Instead, they referred approvingly to their “common life” (zajednički život). They envisioned their ethnically diverse city as a “neighborhood” (komšiluk), spoke of those from other ethnonational groups as “neighbors” (komšije), and valued their association with others as “neighborly relations” (komšijski odnosi). These expressions more aptly capture Sarajevo’s uniqueness and the traits that Sarajevans themselves value in their city’s history. The prefix multi-, meaning “composed of many parts” affirms the existence of distinct cultural, ethnic, and religious communities that do not necessarily overlap and commingle. Common life, on the other hand, necessarily includes tolerance, defined as “a fair and permissive attitude toward those whose race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own.” Like tolerance, common life presupposes that people belong to different groups and are unlikely to assimilate into an undifferentiated, homogenous whole. Sarajevans have long used the concept of neighborliness to express their respect for those of different faiths and nationalities, manifest in the practices of mutual visitations and well-wishing on holidays as well as everyday cordial relations. Common life is neighborliness writ large. It embodies those values, experiences, institutions, and aspirations shared by Sarajevans of different identities, and it has been treasured by most Sarajevans since the city’s founding.”

"Common life" in Sarajevo during the siege. Artwork by TRIO

This neighborliness, though, cannot hold together a common life in the face of totalitarian nationalism. Countless stories from Bosnia begin along the same lines as Hamdo Kahrimanović‘s:

“At the trial [of Dušan Tadić] Kahrumanović was asked if he could explain the barbarism that had seized so many of his former friends, neighbors, and colleagues. “It is difficult to answer this question”, he replied. “I had a key to my nieghbor’s [house] who was a Serb, and he had my key. That is how we looked after each other.”

Without the political and legal institutions to enshrine and ensure the cultural tolerance of Bosnia, zajednički život lives on a knife’s edge: dangerously positioned to devolve into brutal violence like that seen in the 1990s. The failure of the nation-state came late to the former Yugoslavia, but the patterns of its collapse–the erasure of class differences under Tito’s socialism and the rise of nationalist parties in the subsequent political vacuum–are remarkably close to the collapse of the Western European nation-state in the early 20th century. The most hopeful note heard in Bosnia today is perhaps that this zajednički život, though absolutely negated during the war, has somehow remained. Bosnia’s culture of tolerance was not a victim, though the maintenence of a peaceful common life is just as much at risk today in the contemporary failed Bosnian state as it was in the 1980s.

A “Schizophrenic BiH”

“You can call it Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian if you want. That is a way to count people”, says a young man in Enes Zlatar’s documentary Dijagnoza S.B.H. The film, shown to a packed house last night at the Sarajevo Film Festival, takes up the question of language and identity in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia’s constitution does not name an official language for the country, and the issue has since become one more tool for separating Bosnia’s three “constituent people”.

Serbo-Croatian, the named language of Yugoslavia, was essentially an umbrella term used to refer to the supra-national vernacular of the region, codified in 1850. While debates did exist under Tito as to whether or not one language was spoken by the three ethnic groups of the region, they did not have serious political import until the wars of 1990s sensitized unresolved questions of nationality. Today, the West calls the language spoken in the former Yugoslavia Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian (B.C.S. or, translated, Sprpski/Bosanski/Hrvatski-S.B.H.). But the cumbersome term has little appeal. “BCS? More like BS”, a Sarajevan told me.

The reactions among the audience of Dijagnoza S.B.H. were also dismissive of attempts to separate one language into three (or four, as calls for a separate Montenegrin language are now coming from Podgorica). But, no position on Balkan nationality is without ambiguity, and those in the theater deriding the division of their language called in the same breath for the official recognition of a Bosnian language alongside Serbian and Croatian. “Until we have a Bosnian language, I will never be able to meaningfully say ‘I am Bosnian’, because I will always have to say it in another “nation’s” tongue”, said one man.

The audience applauded and another man got up and said the idea of BCS is ridiculous, to equal applause. “We didn’t come to any conclusions in this film”, said Enes Zlatar, the director, “but I have concluded that the diagnosis is S.B.H.—a schizophrenic Bosnia-Herzegovina”.