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A piece I wrote for BIRN’s blog.
"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.
“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”.
The Sarajevo Film Festival starts this Friday, opening with Aida Begić’s Snijeg [Snow]. Orlando Bloom was in Sarajevo this week, and stopped by the film festival office. He will be starring in a new film about the siege of Sarajevo, based on Bill Carter’s book Fools Rush In. Other luminaries flocking to Sarajevo for the film festival include: Kevin Spacey, Charlie Kaufman, and our favorite Lacanian Stalinist, Slavoj Žižek.
Bosnian cinema, and Yugoslav cinema, is a tough thing to characterize, partly beacause the enormous social upheaval of the past century and the contemporary, peaceful chaos of ex-Yugoslav society is a tough thing to characterize. What is found in most films is the macabre humor characteristic of the region. But who really gets the meaning of humor, anyway?
For a look at Bosnian cinema see Kinoeye’s article on “Out of Bosnia”, a 2002 retrospective in London. Or read some of the essays in The Celluloid Tinderbox.
August 15th kicks off the 14th annual Sarajevo Film Festival. Arguably the most important cultural event of the year (the odd “running of the bull” in the countryside notwithstanding), the festival brings in films and directors from across the Balkan Peninsula and Western Europe. This year’s program will be available online in August.
Recent Balkan cinema leads the region’s tradition of self-examination. Popular right now among academics is the formulation that the Balkans is a region positioned (artificially) in between antagonistic cultures (the West and the East, namely) and as a consequence only able to develop a culture that is at base antagonistic to itself. Specifically, it is argued that the West imposes this in between-ness by simultaneously excluding the Balkans from Europe and claiming it as European. Thus, the story goes, there can be no idea or ideology of the Balkans. A Balkan person opposing the Western ideology that excludes him will oppose basic elements of his own ideology; he can only feel at odds with himself.
However, several classics of Balkan cinema suggest a different story. Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1997) ends on a Yugonostalgic note, concluding that a country and culture once did exist, but was riven apart by the raw fact of violence which was primary over any type of ideology. In Sotiris Goritsas’s Balkanisateur (1997), the two protagonists travel from northern Greece to Switzerland. Equally as alienated in Bulgaria as in Switzerland, the two return happily to Balkan Greece and indifferently walk past a sign noting Greece’s recent entry into the EU. Geopolitics is not a problem.
These films, along with art from the war which effortlessly exploited Western commercial symbols, offer a picture of the Balkans which, when looking at itself, is not inhibited by its otherness from the West. Though certainly concerned with questions of the region’s relation to the West, these threads of Balkan culture seem to make steps, rightly or wrongly, in a decidedly post-national direction.
Indir et al. in Mostar on New Years day 2008
The full-time residents of 85 Behdzeta Mutevelica and my fortunate roommates are two students at the University of Sarajevo, hailing originally from the northeastern Bosnian city of Tuzla. Zlatan, or Zlaja, was the first Sarajevan I met and he quickly explained that his name means “Golden Boy”, which his friends later corrected to “Goldy” or the affectionate “Goldilocks”. Zlaja is in the Traffic and Communications Faculty, one of the 24 divisions at the University of Sarajevo.
A consummate conversationalist with a sense of humor equally at home and equally unpredictable among the lightest and heaviest of topics, Zlaja was at the center of my introduction and orientation to Sarajevo. His stories are never without practical import. For instance, I am slightly street-smarter since Zlaja informed me of the preferred strategy of hustlers in Sarajevo: Someone comes up to you on the street and offers to sell you a brick. You either buy the brick for all the money you’ve got, or don’t buy the brick, get punched and robbed. Either way you’re out your money, but only one way do you get away unscathed and with the added bonus of a new brick. “What do you do with the brick” I asked Zlaja. “You build a house”.
Of no less importance is Indir, my second roommate and a student at the Law Faculty. Indir is a promising student with a standing offer of admission to a graduate law program the University of Graz. A conversationalist equal to Zlaja, most of our time together has been spent at traditional Sarajevan pastimes, drinking coffee and talking, appropriate, I’ve learned, even at the odd hour of 5 am.
Both Indir and Zlaja grew up in Tuzla during the war. As self-described “bullies” they spent their formative
Zlaja in Tuzla, 2003
years finding the humorous in their peers and their situation. Indir explained that this bullying was not necessarily exclusive, and often they themselves were prey to their taunting as much as others were. Zlaja told me that, though it sounds odd, he remembers the war as a time of fun and play, where he and his friends were exploring, playing together in the woods around Tuzla held by the ARBiH, and at one point stealing a hand-grenade from a U.N. vehicle and detonating it in a well. This sentiment, the war-time childhood as fun, was echoed by one of my colleague’s brothers, who, in Sarajevo during the siege, explained that during the war there was an intense feeling of community and fraternity which has faded since the peace. Granted, neither of these Bosnians lost anyone close during the war, a fact that both admitted probably allows them this perception.
My impressions of Sarajevo, and of Bosnia at large, are heavily informed by my conversations with my two roommates and the Bosnians I’ve met through them, who have been tirelessly outgoing and patient in explaining the mundane beyond reasonable expectation. They represent a promising desire to learn and to inform others of their country’s problems, future, past and present. If they represent their generation (which they may not), then Bosnia may be up to the huge task of transitioning from a fragmented state to a functioning democratic member of the European Union.
Arrests in Grbavica, 1996
My apartment is in the neighborhood of Grbavica, 20 minutes from Baščaršija in the old town, lying between the Miljacka River and the hills around the southern edge of Sarajevo. During the war it was the foremost part of the Serbian line, and as a result saw some of the worst street fighting during the siege. Today most of the buildings have been reconstructed according to their original plans, though many still show bullet holes or shell-marks that have not been patched up.
In June 1992 Serbian forces entered the neighborhood with little resistance, raising a banner that read “Welcome to the Serbian Republic” at the northern entrance to the neighborhood. Many Croat and Bosniak residents remained in the neighborhood, tolerating the Serbian Army’s martial law. But when the regular army left and paramilitary groups entered the neighborhood, the murder of non-Serbs became a regular occurrence. One corridor was open between Grbavica and the Bosnian Army’s front lines across the Miljacka River: the aptly named bridge of Brotherhood and Unity. But movement in and out of Grbavica was nearly impossible; a common joke ran “Where did you get that tan? Waiting in the sun by the bridge for my mother to come from Grbavica”
When the Serbs handed back Grbavica to the newly formed Federation of BiH in 1996, departing paramilitaries and criminals set fire to most of the buildings and looted what remained. After days of arson and street violence, Italian troops with IFOR moved into the neighborhood and arrested looters and arsonists. The arrests, however, were made with a wry face, as IFOR handed the arrested over to Serbian police who set them free almost immediately.
A look down my street in 1994
With the departure of “The Duke of Grbavica”—a Chetnik warlord who terrorized residents and humanitarians to the last hour before the hand over to Federation police—the most contested neighborhood in Sarajevo finally quieted.
Today, Grbavica is healing fast. Most buildings have been reconstructed (excepting the notorious Hotel Bristol-where Tifa hid out during the war with heroin and a gun, writing songs about his neighborhood). The FK Željezničar stadium has been rebuilt. I sit on my balcony and watch the corps diplomatique drive in their SUVs and German sedans down from the large houses in the hills.
What healing means, though, in post-war Bosnia, is far from clear. For an acclaimed meditation on this, watch Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, which won the Golden Bear in 2006.
