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"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.
Scenes from the Maksimir Stadium riot, 1990
“The war in Croatia started on a soccer field“, my roommate told me last night. On May 13, 1990 a riot broke out in Maksimir Stadium between fans of the Croatian club team Dinamo Zagreb, the Serbian club Crvena Zvezda, and Serbian police Milošević sent to Zagreb to monitor the game. National tensions were extremely high in the weeks before the game. Just one week before the brawl, Croatians rejected the Yugoslav Communist Party and elected the Croatian Democratic Union under nationalist leader Franjo Tuđman. The election effectively signaled Croatia’s intent to declare independence from Yugoslavia, a move vehemently opposed by then President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević.
Numerous small fights between Dinamo fans (the Bad Blue Boys) and Crvena Zvezda fans (Dejilie, or “heroes”) broke out around Zagreb on the day of the game. When Arkan, a notorious gangster, war-criminal, and owner of Crvena Zvezda reportedly led the Dejile into Maksimir Stadium chanting “Zagreb is Serbia” and “We will kill Franjo Tuđman”, a large group of the Bad Blue Boys clashed with the Dejile in the stands and later on the field. Seats were torn up and used as weapons, and a large number of people were stabbed. The Serbian police targeted the Croatian fans and the fight culminated with Dinamo Zagreb captain Zvonimir Boban kicking a police officer who was beating a Bad Blue Boy. Ironically, the police officer was a Bosniak, and later publicly forgave Boban.
The brawl broadcasted a scene of national violence to the region. It was a highly visible explosion of ethnic violence that resounded deeply across a tense and fracturing Yugoslavia. Seven months later Croatia ratified its constitution and declared that Serbs in Croatia were no longer a “national minority”, but a “constituent nation”. A year after the fight in Maksimir Stadium, Croatia declared independence, and in August 1991 Serbia attacked Vukovar, beginning a full-scale ethnic war.
The soccer field today is still a microcosm of national tensions and political realities in the former
Serbian fans holding a banner that reads "Knife, Wire, Srebrenica" at the 2005 Bosnia v. Serbia World Cup qualifying match
Yugoslavia. When Bosnia played Serbia in a World Cup qualifying match in Belgrade in 2005, fights broke out and 19 people were injured. Nationalist chants and insults were exchanged by the two sides. Bosnian fans waved a banner that read “We have 250,000 reasons to hate you” referring to the exaggerated number of Bosnians killed in the war (the currently recognized number is 100,000), while Serb fans made held up pieces of wire, representing the wire that was used to tie up Bosniaks prisoners massacred at Srebrenica. The fighting stopped the game, and FIFA ruled it a draw. The acidity of the insults and the inability of the 4,000 police officers present at the game to contain the violence made loud and clear the resilience of the war’s ethnic tensions and the proximity of violence in the region.
Milorad Dodik as Adolf Hitler on the cover of Slobodna Bosna
Yesterday morning a startling headline showed across The Guardian’s website. “Bosnia Is on the Edge Again” is the title of Paddy Ashdown’s Sunday op-ed. Ashdown, the former High Representative for BiH, architect of the Dayton Accords, and an outspoken advocate of military intervention during the Bosnian War, said the West has fallen asleep at the wheel in Bosnia, letting a nationalist demagogue “aggressively reverse a decade of reforms”.
Ashdown is referring to Milorad Dodik, the current prime minister of the Bosnian Serb “mini state” Republika Srpska, whose nationalistic policies have cost the RS its financial support from USAID and other Western organizations. Dodik is a member of a resented class: war profiteers (there is even a phrase: “nekum brat, nekum rat”, or, “someone’s brother is someone else’s war”). During the war he managed several cigarette brands in Bosnia and Croatia, earning him the nickname “Mile Ronhill“. Dodik has made RS autonomy and allegiance to Serbia his central platform, seeking to separate the entity from BiH financially, politically, and culturally. When Kosovo declared independence this year Dodik responded by calling for the RS to secede from BiH. The international community had none of it.
As sensational and empty as Dodik’s calls for RS independence are, perhaps Ashdown is not crying wolf by giving Dodik’s rhetoric a second thought. In 2005, two scholars, one Bosnian and one American, published a paper assessing reconciliation efforts in the former Yugoslavia. Offhandedly, the paper stated “if NATO and EU peacekeepers were to withdraw from Bosnia today, there would be war tomorrow”. A shocking claim given the trauma of the war and desire for “peace above all else” that it had created.
I asked my colleague what she thought about the claim and she agreed in full. If the international community didn’t hold the RS in BiH, then it would rapidly secede and civil war would break out. Dodik himself displays childish anti-Bosnian behavior, removing a Bosnian flag from a table at a press conference and saying “I do not love Bosnia” in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Dodik’s behavior in this respect is unique. There are few public figures in the former Yugoslavia who espouse an expressly anti-Bosnian ideology. Most opt for the more muted position of quibbling over whether or not Srebrenica was genocide, or whether the war was a civil war or a war of aggression. Few take a wholesale stand against the nations that emerged from the conflict, against the idea of the Bosnian nation, as Dodik has.
A protestor at a rally against Kosovo's declaration of independence holds up a picture of Radovan Karadžić, February 2008
One day after the announcement of Radovan Karadžić’s arrest, posters appeared in the northeastern Bosnian town of Zvornik bearing messages of support for the former ICTY fugitive. They read “Karadžić: Our Serbian hero”, “We won’t let them catch you”, and, perhaps aping Le Monde’s “We are all Americans” of Sept. 13, 2001: “We are all Karadžić”.
On the same day the Serbian Radical Party announced on its website that there would be daily protests in Belgrade against Karadžić’s extradition to the Hague. The protests so far have not been large, with little more than 300 people gathering in the rain in Trg Republika. However, they have been violent and ultra-nationalistic (protesters at one point gathered outside the Turkish embassy. Turkey is a country that has nothing to do with the Karadžić arrest, but the majority of whose citizens share the same religion as Karadžić’s victims).
While the posters and the protests may be little more than the feeble backlash that should be expected when such a symbolic figure falls, what are more unsettling are the tepid reactions in the region, particularly in Serbia. Karadžić’s arrest is seen by some as another act of “punishment” against the Serbs for the wars of the 90s. “Only Serbs are being prosecuted and that’s not right”, Milica Milivojevic from Belgrade told the BBC, “If Karadžić is being sent to The Hague, then others from all sides of the conflict should too”. Even those elated with Karadžić’s arrest seem lukewarm about his extradition, and are cynical about the authorities who took 12 years to find him.
If Karadžić the wartime leader of the RS crafted and employed the myths of ethnic nationalism (still alive and well today), then Karadžić the Hague prisoner has become the myth of justice as a restrained victor’s revenge. Whether or not the cynicism and mistrust is undue (Karadžić did, after all, live in plain sight of NATO troops for several years with an INTERPOL warrant on his head, and the ICTY has a history of being made a farce of by its big fish), the new Karadžić myth moves the region no closer to reconciliation, and no further from the divisions which accelerated it into brutal war. Karadžić the scapegoat serves totalitarian nationalism just as well as Karadžić the president.
