Читать книгу Sarajevo Under Siege - Ivana Macek - Страница 9
ОглавлениеChapter 1
Civilian, Soldier, Deserter
How can people who have never experienced war understand what it is like to live in a city under siege in a state that has disintegrated into warring national armies? The terror aroused by the constant threat to life is intensified by the disruption of everyday existence that living in a war zone entails. Most of us have experienced a similar kind of shock on a smaller scale. Our first confrontation with the death of a person close to us, a disastrous accident with casualties whose faces we recognize, or a natural catastrophe in the place we call home—experiences of devastating loss seem incomprehensible and make us feel powerless. The world as we knew it has been destroyed. With no satisfactory way of dealing with this unprecedented existential situation, we question our previous faith in the orderliness of the world and the social norms that had governed our lives up to that point. This feeling of disorientation is not necessarily harmful in itself; indeed, it might even be necessary for the process of mourning that we must undergo to reorient ourselves to a new reality. War is like other experiences of devastating loss, but with two crucial differences: the losses are caused by fellow human beings, and we can never reorient ourselves completely to the new existential reality. Time after time, as the violence of war inflicts new losses, we are overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of the situation and our powerlessness within it. As Michael Taussig puts it, we find ourselves swinging wildly between “terror as usual” and shock (1992:17–18). When the agents of death and chaos are not impersonal forces but other people, former compatriots, and even neighbors, who suddenly bring destruction down upon us, the situation is even more profoundly unsettling. The faith in humanity on which society itself is founded is constantly undermined, and every action we take to try to save ourselves seems trivial or pointless.
In this light, some of the most shocking experiences of loss and disorientation in our peacetime lives in Europe and America resemble wartime experiences. Deaths caused by criminal gang violence in the inner cities and by terrorist attacks in New York City, London, and Madrid—as well as the “peacekeeping operations” that the United States, NATO, and the United Nations conduct in African countries and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—are all caused by people, yet they are incomprehensible and out of control. In these circumstances, we react in ways that are similar to those of people caught up in war. This resemblance makes the experiences of people in Sarajevo during the siege of much more profound interest to us than we would have expected.
Both the immediate experiences that being caught up in war entails and the moral dilemmas that arise when struggling to survive in a city under siege make untenable the notion that wars are rational, controlled, sometimes even honorable, ordered and limited by the laws of war, with legitimate aims and clearly distinct opposing sides—a notion that still dominates the practice of international politics.1 Almost without exception, whether conflict rages across international borders or attempts to impose new boundaries between peoples, war is gruesomely devoid of logic. Perhaps that is why fiction and film seem to capture wartime realities more powerfully than journalistic accounts and expert analyses. The moral unacceptability of “the laws of war” becomes appallingly clear when we examine the terminology designed to disguise the more ghastly rules of war: “collateral damage,” “low-intensity conflict,” and “ethnic cleansing” are among the euphemisms that obscure killing, starvation, and displacement. War legitimizes mass murder and destruction of property, which no other legal system allows on such a scale within such a short period of time.2
By trying to find the causes and logic of war—often in hope of understanding it and being able to control the damage it inflicts, if not stop or prevent it in future—we unavoidably fall into reifying the divisions into distinct warring sides, with their aims and justifications for mass violence. Such was the case with many expert analyses of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also with many Sarajevans in their attempts to orient themselves in chaotic life circumstances and to justify their often morally ambiguous practices. In order to avoid the pitfalls of oversimplifying war and ignoring its incomprehensible, unjustifiable, and unacceptable nature, I chose to let individuals’ lived experiences of violence stand at the center of research and from that point to trace the effects of war on society and culture.3 This account explores Sarajevans’ subjective responses to the death and destruction that engulfed their city and their repeated, though often futile, efforts to make sense of the disturbing and irrational situations in which they found themselves.
After struggling to orient myself in the midst of chaotic and contradictory experiences, I realized that these feelings and ideas could be sorted into three different modes of perceiving war. At first, people are so struck by the outbreak of a war they had thought impossible that the social norms they had thought secure collapse. I call this initial disbelief and the vacuum of meanings that follows the “civilian” mode of perceiving war. Then people attempt to order and explain the events and actors, adopting what I call the “soldier” mode. Aligning themselves with one or another of the warring sides, they seek protection and solidarity, giving some meaning to the risks they must face. The soldier mode offers a moral rationale for conflict, making the destruction and killing seem necessary and even acceptable. Finally, people realize through their own experiences of war that these explanations do not hold and shift to a third standpoint that I call the “deserter” mode.4 Abandoning the neat divisions between citizens and armies, friends and foes that mark the civilian and soldier modes, people give up allegiances to any opposing side and take responsibility for their own actions. This stance does not constitute treason or betrayal but expresses profound skepticism about the high ideals that justify vicious acts and an effort to recover some small measure of humanity in a world gone berserk.
These modes of feeling and thinking are not necessarily sequential or mutually exclusive; often people hold them simultaneously or shift back and forth between them as their situation changes. Everyone caught up in a war, or dealing with war as a journalist, diplomat, or researcher, employs all three of these perspectives. The inconsistencies in perceptions of war that are characteristic of those who are subjected to it involuntarily arise not only from war’s chaotic character but also from the best efforts to come to terms with it.
Imitation of Normal Life
As I focused on the experience of violence, I listened closely to what preoccupied my informants and how they spoke about everyday concerns. I noticed that people in Sarajevo often used the concept of normality to describe some situation, person, or way of life. The concept carried a moral charge, a positive sense of what was good, right, or desirable: a “normal life” was a description of how people wanted to live; a “normal person” thought and did things that were regarded as acceptable. The term pertained not only to the way of life people felt they had lost but also to a moral framework that might guide their actions. Normality not only communicated the social norms held by the person using it but also indicated her or his ideological position. The preoccupation with normality reflected Sarajevans’ utmost fear and their utmost shame: that in coping with the inhumane conditions of war, they had also become dehumanized and that they might be surviving only by means they would previously have rejected as immoral. Had they become psychologically, socially, and culturally unfit to live among decent people?
Figure 1. In 1995 graffiti appeared saying: “Nobody here is normal” (“Ovdje niko nije normalan”). Sarajevo, spring 1996. Photo by author.
Social norms are always in flux. Each person continuously defines and redefines his or her norms of conduct and perceptions of society in accordance with his or her daily experiences. In the context of war, the wholesale destruction of people’s homes, the intensity of chaotic feelings, and the constant demand to respond to unprecedented conditions make the pace and scope of change so dramatic that it is more easily noticed than in peacetime. I found it useful to follow the process of change in perceptions of normality in order to understand and explain people’s experiences of war in Sarajevo.
Schematically, change can be described as a process that occurs again and again:
• A norm exists.
• Violence disrupts normality; the norm does not hold anymore.
• Chaos reigns—a vacuum of meaning, disorientation, and normlessness.
• New truths compete to fill this vacuum: political ideologies, media interpretations, social contacts, rumors, and individuals’ own experiences.
• A new norm emerges, but it too is disrupted as the cycle continues.
Massive political violence disrupts the way we know the world works in peacetime and makes it worthless for orienting ourselves in a war zone. We feel plunged into a state of chaos, yet we are forced to take action in response to constant emergencies. What we previously found meaningful has been shattered, vanished, or become impossible, even inconceivable. As we struggle to make some sense of our situation, we seek desperately to fill this vacuum with new meanings. At this point, differing interpretations of the conflict compete for our allegiance. These contesting truths are promulgated by politicomilitary organizations and power elites; they are manufactured or propagated by the media, whether politically controlled or independent; they arise and circulate within our social circles, often in the form of rumors; and they come from our own desperate efforts to make sense of our disparate personal experiences. Amid a dizzying variety of interpretations, we settle on whatever seems to us the most useful guide to action and a notion of the world we can live with. On this basis, we join with like-minded and similarly situated others to develop a new norm, however provisional. But the cycle is repeated as new experiences fracture whatever tentative certainty and fragile consensus has been attained. The process continues on all levels of our lives, from the most existential through the material to the ideological.
Two examples illuminate this process. The first highlights how perceptions of normality changed on the most basic material level. A young woman, a doctor of medicine who became a friend, told me a story from the first months of war, when most Sarajevans were still reasoning within their peacetime standards. She and a friend of hers were going to a party one Saturday evening. As parties were very rare at that time, they fixed themselves up the best they could. Her friend even put on nylon stockings, which were already a scarce commodity. As they walked, the shelling started, and the explosions were very near. My acquaintance threw herself into the nearest ditch and shouted at her friend, who was still standing in the street, to do the same. The bewildered girl shouted that she could not because her nylon stockings would get torn. “To hell with your nylon stockings,” replied my acquaintance, “It is your head that will get blown off if you don’t get down immediately.”
The second example illustrates the changes in the relations between neighbors who belonged to different ethnoreligious and national groups and in the moral values attached to these relations. It was told to me by my host, a middle-aged man and an avowed anti-nationalist from a Muslim family background. At the height of the war, now and then he helped an old lady in the neighborhood by fetching water for her. It started one day when he saw her at her window and offered his help. After that she would sometimes wait for him with her canisters. One day a man in the street, presumably a neighbor who knew the old lady, commented, “Oh, you Serbs always stick together.” My host froze and told him his name, which was Muslim. “I think the man was ashamed,” he commented when he told me the story. As my host saw the situation, he was doing his neighborly duty. The man misinterpreted this solidarity in ethnoreligious terms, because the meanings of neighborliness and national identity were being renegotiated in the new atmosphere of rumors and media reporting of betrayal, or at least the lack of neighborly protection across national lines.
In peacetime, most people perceive normality as a stable, taken-for-granted state. Indeed, an essentialist conviction that this is how things really are seems central to our feeling of security, and discovering that nothing can be trusted anymore is almost as unsettling as the immediate dangers of living in a war zone. Political actors can exploit people’s need for security to promote their own versions of reality, and consequently those with more power have more to say about what normality is. However, even in wartime people do not automatically accept new explanations, ideas, and norms. It is more accurate to say that the redefinition of normality takes place in a political space where the power to define the truth is highly contested.
Characteristically, during the siege of Sarajevo, as in other situations of war, occupation, and captivity, powerful feelings of shame followed each breach and fall of a cherished social norm, while feelings of pride were associated with every solution to a predicament or resolution of a dilemma that created a new meaning in daily life. Yet even resourcefulness and resilience did not break the cycle. There were ways of escaping it, either by disconnecting psychologically or by fleeing. The local term for the emotional numbness and irrationality that followed an excess of pain was prolupati.5 People I saw who simply stood in open places during the shelling as if nothing was going on, or an elderly man with a distant look who was not interested in joining the rest of his family in their summer house in a peaceful part of coastal Croatia, might have escaped the exhausting circle of constantly reestablishing some sort of normality, but the price was the loss of all meaning. They lost contact with their feelings, including the fear necessary for physical survival and the need for closeness necessary for emotional survival. They were the zombies of the war. Refugees who escaped from the physical perils of war found very quickly that escape did not free them from a need to come to terms with the politics of national belonging, the violence they had witnessed and evaded, and their decision to leave while others remained, with all that that meant materially, socially, and morally.
Each and every turning in this spiral of shattered and re-created norms was marked by a movement between some semblance of normality and the eruption of chaos. People who could easily give me a sophisticated political analysis one day would the very next day express bewilderment and ask me to explain to them why all this was happening. Something that had made sense could suddenly become meaningless; what had momentarily seemed normal could crumble into nothingness. Taussig has described this oscillation as a “doubleness of social being, in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a rumour, a sight, something said, or not said—something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it” (1992:18).
What people meant by “normality” swung back and forth between two points of reference, peacetime and wartime. When Sarajevans spoke of normal life, they meant the prewar way of life and social norms that had been lost amid the violent circumstances of the siege. They saw the way of living that they had been forced to adopt during the siege as abnormal, yet it became strangely normal during wartime. Taussig calls this incomplete shift of mental stance the “normality of the abnormal” (1992:17–18). Sarajevans coined the expression “imitation of life” to mark this coping strategy. They patched together a semblance of existence, living from day to day on terms they could neither finally accept nor directly alter. This stance enabled Sarajevans to conduct themselves according to wartime norms while remembering their prewar norms and enshrining them as the ideal of how life should be. It did not, however, resolve the ethical dilemmas that arose amid their daily struggles: What is an acceptable everyday normality? What is a decent human life? Sarajevans were caught in a constant pendulum swing between the two sets of norms. Should they resist the impulse to run before the sniper? Should they cling to the cosmopolitanism that, like their city, lay in ruins, or should they judge others on the basis of national belonging?
Almost every detail of everyday life was subject to constant evaluation and revaluation. The most intensely charged and deeply disputed domain was that of ethnonational identification. Sarajevans had to reconcile their own lived experiences as members of ethnocultural groups in a multicultural city with the mutually exclusive, even hostile constructions of ethnonational identity that political leaders formulated and the war increasingly forced upon them. Whatever position they chose, it was both existentially unstable and morally charged.
Finding a Method for an Anthropology of War
Most authors who have tried to understand individuals’ lived experience of violence and transform it into words that others can comprehend encounter serious difficulties. The experience of traumatic violence is profoundly personal; it penetrates to the very core of our being. How do we translate existential fear and bodily pain into terms that those who have not shared this psychological and somatic violation of the self can understand? For all who lived through it, the siege of Sarajevo was a “limit situation,”6 plunging them into life circumstances that were on the border of what is humanly possible to understand, conceptualize, and describe in words. Listening to the silences and noticing the gaps in people’s stories that often betray an inassimilable experience is only the beginning; we must also observe and convey the full range of people’s responses to appalling events. Even when people undergo common experiences, each person comes to terms with them—or fails to come to terms with them—in her or his own way. This existential loneliness in the process of making meaning in war exacerbates the erosion of trust between people, but at the same time it strengthens the need to find others with whom to feel a sense of belonging.
Wars are politically sensitive situations where lives are at stake and truth is hotly contested. When words are an integral part of a culture that has been so thoroughly jeopardized by political violence, it is important to be aware of whose words we use to describe these experiences. At the same time that trauma generates silence, language is manipulated and corrupted by the political culture of armed conflict. As producers of knowledge about war, anthropologists are in a sensitive position because our representations of war, though less powerful than those of the politicians, create a sort of truth about it that circulates internationally. That is why I found it essential to depict the situation from a multiplicity of different perspectives. I chose people belonging to various groups—defined by national identity, ethnoreligious background, place of residence, age, gender, and family position—and from different networks I established in Sarajevo. I also present as accurately as possible the contexts in which people constructed their interpretations of the situation and acted upon them.
Tape-recording Sarajevans’ own words and integrating them into the text allows people whose voices and viewpoints could not be heard amid the competing truths about the war to be presented in their own language for describing their encounter with limit situations during the siege and to share their reflections on the nationalist politics that gave rise to and sustained such massive violence. I conducted over a hundred hours of interviews with approximately fifty different people. About ten of them I considered war friends, who generously shared scarce resources with me, taught me how to cope with conditions in the city, and recounted their experiences and perspectives on the war. Each interview was rich and covered most of the subjects I sought to explore: how people responded to existential dangers and managed amid material deprivation; changes that occurred within families and in relationships with friends and neighbors; shifts in the level of religiosity and the strength of national identifications. While the situations I describe and the responses I analyze here were common among informants, I illustrate these experiences and reflections with those voices that convey them most accurately and eloquently. I also quote informants whose positions and perspectives differed from those of the majority, since I am interested in sociocultural variations in people’s responses to the war.
I draw on my own experiences and reflections as well as on Sarajevans’ accounts in order to comprehend and communicate this shockingly concrete, yet subtle and elusive knowledge of war. Living in the besieged city alongside Sarajevans, I too had to employ all of my faculties—my intuition and cognition, my senses and emotions—in order to manage from day to day, as well as record what they and I were undergoing. In some instances, I found my own experiences helpful in understanding what Sarajevans were telling me.7 For example, I recount my own responses to being shot at—sudden depression as my sense of purpose evaporated, and then a process of reaffirming my reasons for being in Sarajevo—because, even though my informants told me similar stories, my own experience was the one I could describe the best. I do not, however, include anything personal that does not bear directly on the central questions that animated my fieldwork—just as I include nothing about my informants’ private lives that has no bearing on their wartime experiences.
“Giving myself over to the phenomenon,” rather than constructing what Taussig calls “an account from the outside and above” (1992:10), seemed to be the only way of gaining relevant knowledge and representing it to others. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut once characterized anthropology as “poetry which pretends to be scientific” (1974:176). Having a poet’s approach to fieldwork, as well as to writing, can yield valuable insights and suggest innovative forms of presentation for an anthropology of war. A disciplined subjectivity becomes not a flaw or obstacle but a crucial element for creating meaningful knowledge.
Doing fieldwork in war conditions may be hazardous to the project as well as the participant-observer because he or she might experience events that he or she has no way of dealing with and become so distressed as to be unable to continue the work. However, most people—ordinary citizens, not just anthropologists—have psychological defenses that enable them to function in distressing situations. The problem for researchers such as myself is that key psychological defense mechanisms make us hear, observe, and remember only those phenomena we are capable of dealing with and consign the rest to silence and seeming oblivion (Nordstrom 1997:21–22). When she was immersed in fieldwork on witchcraft in the Bocage, Jeanne Favret-Saada noticed how difficult she found it to remember parts of conversations that touched on what she “did not want to hear,” even when transcribing her tapes afterward (1980:176–77, n. 1).
I encountered similar difficulties in recalling and processing conversations during my research. Two years after completing my fieldwork, I discovered many instances in which Sarajevans told me about their own breakdowns, or breakdowns that people close to them had experienced, during the war. I was astonished because by that time I had already read and analyzed the material several times. I recalled almost everything else these informants said, but not that they spoke about psychological breakdowns. I remembered one brief meeting with an elderly man in March 1995 who had obviously lost the will to live. I knew that one of my war friends had a physical breakdown, but I did not connect it with her story of how she suddenly became terribly afraid of getting hurt. I did not remember another war friend telling me that a friend of hers was taking sedatives in order to function; she worried because the sedatives were addictive, and no one knew how long the war was going to last. I had not recalled a young man telling me about his mother’s breakdown. Only after the war had ended, when I myself had experienced some psychological effects of immersion in the war, was I able to hear and take in these stories, and a completely new dimension of war emerged in front of me. No amount of observation can enable us to see and reflect upon phenomena we are unprepared for and unable to assimilate. Yet what we have ignored or pushed aside tends to reemerge when we are ready to deal with it. The field notes, tape-recorded interviews, and printed material I collected in Sarajevo were invaluable as I returned to analyze them again and again with new insights and questions.
A Stranger and a Friend
My fieldwork was shaped by the peculiar social position I occupied in Sarajevo. I was an outsider and an insider at one and the same time; to adopt Hortense Powdermaker’s expression, I was both “a stranger and a friend” (1966). I was not Sarajevan, and I did not know what life there was like before the siege. Yet I shared with Sarajevans a common Yugoslav sociocultural and political experience, with a common language and everything else that it implied. And I came to learn about the war by sharing it with them.
Still, most of the time I was treated like a guest. Ever hospitable, Sarajevans were willing to help me and take care of me when I needed it, which as a newcomer I often did. My presence was an interruption in their usual wartime existence—a very welcome one, I was assured—and I was never treated completely like one of them. However much I tried not to be special but to fall into their usual routines, life was never quite the same when I was around. I did not fully realize this until an incident in March 1995. I had said my goodbyes in the morning and left for the airport, but flights were canceled because of shooting, so I came back at lunchtime. My hosts welcomed me back, but they were slightly embarrassed by the very simple meal they had to offer me. I joked with one of their nephews that, as soon as I left, the food went back to the normal monotonous war diet, but inside I felt very naive. During that stay in Sarajevo I had the impression that I shared my hosts’ usual wartime fare.
The former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia had six constituent peoples8 (narodi)—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Montenegrins, and Macedonians (and, from 1974, Yugoslavs)—as well as several national minorities (narodnosti). The three constituent peoples of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina were Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. In 1995 the earlier label “Muslim” was replaced by “Bosniac” (Bošnjak) in the new constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This substitution caused a lot of international confusion, and local discontent by Serbs and Croats, as “Bosniac” sounds very much like “Bosnian” (Bosanac), which implies all the people of Bosnia, and often of Herzegovina, too.9 I chose to use the term Muslim rather than Bosniac because this is the term that my informants used. In Sarajevo, the two largest national groups before the war were Muslims and Serbs, while the Croats were less than 10 percent of the population.
At first I wanted to assume that my identity as a Croat would not matter to my fieldwork. After all, I was not a nationalist and did not come from a religiously observant family. Only after my work in Sarajevo was completed did I come to recognize how profoundly my views on ethnonationalism had been shaped by my grandparents. My maternal grandmother was a Croatian Serb, an atheist, and a communist sympathiser, and her views influenced my life and ideology. Her husband, my grandfather, was Croat but he, like her, was anti-nationalist and a communist sympathizer. He did his time in Jasenovac, a concentration camp,10 because of his illegal support of communists and Jews during World War II. He died when I was a child, so I have only early memories of him, but my grandmother passed on these ideas to me. During the war, however, I seldom told others about my Serbian roots, because I feared that all my anti-nationalistic arguments would have been dismissed as a simple reflection of the fact that I was of “mixed blood,” as was presumed by the ideology that was predominant during the war. I wanted to present myself as a “real” Croat and say that it did not matter all that much! My father’s family was entirely Croatian in background and especially the women were practicing Catholics in a low-key manner that was common during the socialist period.
My national identity influenced my fieldwork primarily, however, because it affected how others saw me. Amid the war that convulsed the former Yugoslavia, national identity became a life-and-death matter, and the ideas that people held about their own group and the others became highly salient in shaping interactions in Sarajevo. When the horrors of war were interpreted in nationalist idioms, most people looked at one another through national lenses. And they looked at me in the same way. I often expressed my support for the notion that nationality was not really important, and I made it clear that I had no allegiance to Croatian nationalist ideologies. Nonetheless, people related to me as a Croat from Croatia. It took a long time before I understood that, no matter how I felt and defined myself, I was still classified within the Sarajevan categories of “us” and “others.” Being a Croat placed me in different positions in regard to the various people I met and interviewed. Though I often thought this positioning was unnecessary and even unfortunate, it gave me firsthand experience of what nationality meant in Sarajevo during the war.
I was lucky because the couple who became my hosts was “mixed”; he came from a Muslim family, and she from a Serbian one. Characteristically, they had strong anti-nationalistic sentiments, a view that I shared. This commonality in difference created a secure and relaxed home atmosphere and rapidly generated mutual sympathies among us. We often joked about our ascribed national identities. For example, if in a debate I supported his wife’s position or she supported mine, my host would always declare: “udruži se krst sa križem” (the cross [krst] got united with the cross [križ]) against the Muslims, the first representing the Serbian variant and the second the Croatian variant for the Christian cross. Another running joke between us was my ignorance when it came to religious expressions, which were often synonymous with national ones. One day, during my first stay in 1994, my host asked me what the Catholic greeting was when someone entered a house. Muslims say “Merhaba” or “Selam alejkum,” and he wondered what Catholics said. I had no ready answer. I knew the greeting had a central figure such as Mary, Jesus, or God, and the first expression that came to my mind was “Pomoz Bog” (God help). But that was the Orthodox and Serbian greeting; the Catholic and Croatian one was “Hvaljen Isus” (Praised be Jesus). As soon as I said it, I realized that it must be wrong, but it was too late. They were already teasing me for not being a real Croat. Some years afterward my host told me that from that moment on he was sure that I was no nationalist.
My lack of nationalist views and religious observance made it somewhat easier for a Croatian from a family background that was presumed to be Catholic to get along in Sarajevo. At the same time, I initially did not see the national lenses through which the majority of Sarajevans redefined their relations with one another during the siege. Even when I noticed the distrust between national groups that grew as each blamed the war on the others, I found it difficult to grasp that people were relating to me in the same way.
I was first struck by this fact in March 1995 when I accompanied a Swedish friend who was a journalist to a set of interviews about Sarajevan religious communities to serve as her interpreter. In the Muslim community’s building we were met by two serious men in suits. They were very polite and treated us properly in every way. Our bags were searched, as was routinely done, and we were shown into a room where one of the men invited us to sit down and asked us to explain who we were and what the interview would be used for. We gave our names and my friend explained that it was for her program on Swedish radio. During the interview, this man answered her questions but said not one word more than was absolutely necessary. The other man sat at a large table that was slightly removed from the interview scene, and I realized that he was there only to observe and take notes. After this stiff, unsatisfying encounter, we went to the Catholic community. There we were met in a somewhat more relaxed fashion. The man we were to interview received us on his own and took us to a very beautiful neoclassical room dating from the Austro-Hungarian period. He asked how he could help us, and my friend presented us and her task in the same manner. The man livened up at the sound of my Croatian name, which he remarked was “beautiful,” and then happily told me of his years in Zagreb. The interview passed in an atmosphere of goodwill. Although he was reserved, he described some of the problems the Catholic community was having with the situation and expressed some criticism of the city’s domination by the Muslim community. Walking in the street afterward, I felt more trust in this man than in the Muslim representatives, which surprised me. It felt like a genuine “here is where I belong after all” experience. So I began to understand how difficult it was not to put on national lenses during the war.
Our visit to the representative of the Orthodox community was rather sad. The clergyman, who was the only official representative of the Orthodox Church in Sarajevo, was a tiny man who appeared both scared and forgotten. He said almost nothing and never uttered a whole sentence, except when he told us that the government was very correct toward him and always saw to it that he was invited to official ceremonies, along with the Catholic and Muslim religious representatives. Being a very visible Serb in Sarajevo during the siege made him a vulnerable and isolated figure. Most other Sarajevans with Serbian family backgrounds kept a low profile, since the city was still besieged by the Serbian armed forces on the surrounding hills and in parts of the city. Indeed, I too kept quiet about my Serbian grandmother.
While new acquaintances made simple presumptions about my identity, people whom I got to know over time tried to explain to themselves who I was and to figure out what national or ideological category I fit into. The fact that I was obviously Croatian and self-consciously not a nationalist was not enough; they had to sort out my position in relation to themselves, not simply regard me as a stranger and outsider. On my first visit to Sarajevo I got acquainted with a Catholic Croat family who helped me a lot and invited me to be with them for Sundays and Catholic holidays. I was happy to come, since it gave me the opportunity to meet people, to learn about their customs, share, and enjoy them. Only in 1996 did I realize that they were inviting me because they thought I should not be alone, without a family, on a holiday. They were treating me as one of them, while I was regarding them as different. In my eyes, they were very religious, going to mass, taking the holy sacrament, praying at home, and blessing the food. They noticed that I knew little about Catholicism, especially Croatian customs. One of the younger women in the family once told me that it must be because Croats were an absolute majority in Croatia that people like me were not so religious. At that moment, it struck me as a strange comment, especially since religion was making a tremendous comeback in Croatia, but later on I realized that she was right. Our identities are always shaped by our sociocultural context, and it matters whether you belong to a minority or to a majority group. The main purpose of her comment, however, was to explain to herself why I was not as religious as she was, since both of us were Croats. She was looking for a way to think of me as belonging to “us” rather than “them,” despite such important differences between us. As a Croat from Croatia, I could be nonreligious but nevertheless all right.
Another encounter with a Sarajevan Croat ended with my summary dismissal. He was a sociology professor who had done some work on war, so a mutual acquaintance suggested that we meet. The man treated me as if I were his student and told me in no uncertain terms that I could not do research on religious questions in Sarajevo. I never understood why, and I felt bad after this conversation. Later, when I transcribed the interview, I saw something I did not remember. In telling me of his time as a student in Zagreb, he emphasized how arrogant the Croatian Croats were toward him, a Bosnian Croat, and how the Croatians always thought that they understood Bosnia, although they did not. His comment condemning my interest in religions in Sarajevo came in this context. Again I was identified as a Croatian Croat, but this time characterized as an ignorant and arrogant person, thinking that the explanation of the war in Bosnia could be found in religious questions.
Those Muslims I became closest to, because of mutual sympathies and proof that we were willing to help each other, often said, “Look at you, you are like one of us,” although it was obvious to all of us that I was neither Muslim nor Sarajevan. This exclamation came usually when I did something in a way that they were used to. For instance, I preferred to drink coffee out of a fildžan (a small coffee cup without a handle) rather than out of a šoljica (demitasse, a small coffee cup with a handle). Traditionally, a fildžan is a Muslim coffee cup, and a šoljica a Christian one. To ask a non-Muslim guest what she would prefer had always been a matter of politeness, an adaptation to the frequent social interaction among members of different ethnoreligious communities. In the former Yugoslavia, the rest of Europe was perceived as a sociocultural ideal. Since the Italians and the French drank coffee out of demitasse cups, secularized people tended to see the fildžan as backward or slightly exotic. During the war, some anti-Muslim citizens regarded using a fildžan as a primitive custom, and in some homes I was told with a chilly tone that they did not have any fildžani. In Muslim houses, by choosing the Muslim coffee cup I demonstrated to my new acquaintances that I was open to them and accepting of their customs. Of course, I had absolutely no idea beforehand that this mattered; it was just a natural part of my anthropological attitude and curiosity to learn new customs, as I tried to explain. But, whatever my intentions were, by adopting simple everyday ways, I was also signaling national sympathies.
Once I was perceived as being “like one of us,” I was presented that way to others. To most Sarajevans, my name was obviously Croatian; it was Slavic, non-Muslim, and not the Serbian variant, Jovana. My accent, too, often needed an explanation when a Muslim introduced me to another Muslim: “Ivana comes from Zagreb, but she is like one of us,” or “She is Croatian, but she is all right.” This was the usual way of relating to someone whom one liked but who belonged to a different ethnoreligious or national group.
Being one of “us” did not always necessarily signify a national category. Some alternative collective identities were forged during the war; the solidarity between all Sarajevans who stayed in the city was among the strongest. Toward the end of the war, when Sarajevans were becoming annoyed by all the foreigners coming to their city after the siege was over, a Muslim friend introduced me to a colleague who was to help me with my research by saying, “Ivana is doing research about war in Sarajevo, and she has been here with us from the beginning, through all the worst.” When we left, I pointed out to her that I actually had not been in Sarajevo through the very worst, but she cut me off and explained that she had to say so because at that point people were so sensitive and the man would not have helped me otherwise.
During my fieldwork I met a lot of people with whom I never established closer relations, although I conducted interviews with them. This pattern was characteristic of my interactions with Muslim “internally displaced persons”11 from Eastern Bosnia. We found no common interests, probably because they were not in the focus of my research, and neither they nor I cultivated a relationship. I interviewed several Serbs and would have liked to get to know them better. But the Serbs were really the losers in Sarajevo; they were scared to stick out, so I did not insist on more meetings. I had a feeling that frequent visits from a stranger would have called attention to them in the neighborhood and aroused suspicious gossip.
Had I been of Serbian or Muslim origin, I would have been able to gather different material, but it would still have been incomplete and affected by my origin. As my host pointed out to me when I said that Croats seemed to be so negative toward Muslims while it was not the case the other way around: “You should only hear what your Muslims say about Croats in front of me!” Of course, I could imagine, because I knew what Croats were saying about Muslims and what Muslims were saying about Serbs, so it was unlikely that it would be any different the other way around.
The Ethics of Research on Suffering
I started my fieldwork during the Croatian war, spending two weeks in Zagreb and its surroundings in October 1991, and then one month in March 1993 traveling to Croatian and Herzegovinian front lines in Nova Gradiška, Dubrovnik, Ravno, Mostar, and Zadar. In the autumn of 1993 I spent three months in Zagreb preparing my way to Bosnia and interviewing Sarajevans who were in Zagreb at that time. Fieldwork in Sarajevo, which is central to this analysis, was conducted during five different periods: two weeks in September 1994; one month in March 1995; two weeks in September 1995; three months in the spring of 1996; and two weeks in September 1996. All in all, I spent six months in Sarajevo, and an additional six months in Croatia and Herzegovina.
My stays in Sarajevo were so short, especially in 1994 and 1995, because of the circumstances of the war and the limited duration of UN identity cards. When I once complained about not being able to spend a whole year in the field, as was conventional among anthropologists, my host told me that living in Sarajevo would make it impossible to do research. I could write a very good war diary, or even a novel, he said, but I could not do social-scientific research. I believe that he was right, because several times during my fieldwork I experienced the urge to abandon my research and do something more immediately useful. The rather abstract humanitarian project of documenting and analyzing people’s responses to political violence did not seem meaningful under the circumstances. I felt compelled to get a job that helped people directly, perhaps with a humanitarian agency or where I could use my skills in a more practical way. Many of my Sarajevan friends whose studies had been interrupted did useful work, which seemed to help them keep their balance. But then, I realized that, had I been a Sarajevan caught up in the war involuntarily, I would surely have done everything I could to leave the city, as many people of my generation and background actually did.
The constant awareness of life-threatening danger and the pressure of time demanded more emotional energy than long-term research in peacetime. As a native speaker sharing a similar prewar culture, I noticed small details on the streets, overheard conversations in cafés, and noticed the nuances in people’s expressions. Everything I saw or heard was material, and I was desperately trying to catch as much of it as I could. Working as well as living in Sarajevo under siege was so intense and exhausting that the only way I could relax a bit was to remember that I did not have to write detailed notes on my tape-recorded interviews while I was there.
After each of these periods in the field, I wrote and published articles in newspapers and scholarly journals. It was difficult to find my way through all these experiences, interviews, and written materials and figure out what was most important to say about the war in Sarajevo. Had I not done the analysis along the way, I dare say that the task of writing about the war would have been overwhelming. Working out the analysis gradually, between periods in Sarajevo, provided me with a fairly clear structure by the time I finished the fieldwork in 1996.
Still, the periods I spent out of the field were burdened not only with the usual adjustment to different living conditions and social circles but also with fear that something terrible might happen to the people I cared about in Sarajevo and a clear awareness of how utterly powerless I was to help them. When I had a respite from the traumatic situation for the time being and was safe in Sweden, I was beset by a diffuse post-traumatic depression and stress. Only after the war was over and the situation in Sarajevo was more secure did this sense of constant apprehension lift.
When I first sought to enter Bosnia, in the autumn of 1993, the situation was very bad. The fighting between the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Armija Bosne i Hercegovine) [ABiH] and the Croat Defense Council (Hrvatsko vijeće obrane) [HVO] made traveling as a private person from Zagreb to Sarajevo almost impossible. The country was full of checkpoints held by all sorts of military formations. Only Bosnians fleeing from the war were desperate enough to run the risks. The only viable option for entering the country was to travel with a UN accreditation. The UN was the only neutral military force in the region, with relatively good logistics, and it enabled a limited number of accredited civilians to move into and out of Bosnia. Most of the accreditations were held by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) recognized by the UN, humanitarian workers, and journalists. Although passengers had to sign a form saying that the UN had no obligation to them and that they were traveling at their own risk, this option was still the safest. I became well acquainted with people in NGOs recognized by the UN, but they used their accreditations to enable Bosnian staff members to travel out of the war zone to strengthen contacts and have a brief respite from the war. The rationale for the UN’s decision to restrict the number of people it helped to move into and out of Bosnia was to limit civilian casualties. The effect, however, was further isolation of the country, which suited the leaders of the warring sides and increased the suffering of the population.
Human rights and peace activists in Zagreb were cautious about traveling to Bosnia for ethical reasons as well. Many felt that they should do so only if they could ameliorate the situation in some concrete way. Foreign journalists who found a civil war in Europe intriguing and wanted to make fast and flashy accounts of it frequently called on activists in Zagreb for assistance. One journalist from Australia demanded to talk on the phone with an English-speaking woman who had been raped during the war in Bosnia. This sort of voyeuristic sensationalism and exploitation of victims caused revulsion among activists. The episode made me think about my motivations for doing fieldwork during the war. I felt compelled to find out about the war in the former Yugoslavia not because my life was boring and I was looking for stimulation but because my whole world was falling apart and I had to understand it in order to put it together again, even if only partially. I did not know whether conducting an ethnographic study of the siege of Sarajevo would be useful in any way, but I remained convinced that giving voice to the civilians whose experiences were left out of war accounts justified my working there.
During the years of my intermittent visits to Sarajevo, I questioned this reason many times. In the spring of 1995, when the situation in Sarajevo was deteriorating after a long period of relative quiet, I felt totally powerless. I tried to do something more practical for the people I had become attached to, who were once again at the mercy of destructive forces beyond their reach. I thought that since I could travel in and out of the city, I could do something they could not do for themselves. I was wrong. True, I could record their story and eventually share it with the world, but at the time that did not seem to matter. Nothing they or I did could make any real difference. After I left Sarajevo in late March, I just had to sit and wait for reports of Sarajevo being shelled. Overwhelmed by frustration, I fought an inner battle not to give up, not to let my work drown in a flood of meaninglessness and depression. I clung to the idea that documenting the war from an anthropological perspective must be worth while, and that proved to be my lifeline. As I thought of the people I left in Sarajevo, I knew that my being there off and on did not make much difference, but it was a change from the monotony of their wartime existence. My visits broke through their isolation from the rest of the world, which was killing their spirits more surely than shells and bullets. Through me they could hear about their relatives and friends abroad, receive a letter, and get a tiny present containing something that they had not seen since the beginning of the siege. Perhaps I could be a part of their lifeline.
Figure 2. My hosts’ daughter made a collage with my face on a funny figure bearing a sack of gifts flying over Sarajevo. She used the panoramic photograph that I took in 1994, when her parents took me to see this celebrated view.
It was through family connections between Bosnian refugees and Sarajevans living through the siege that I found a home in the war. At the beginning of 1994, although I knew that I wanted to conduct fieldwork in Bosnia, I had still not found a place to do it. I decided to discuss doing fieldwork in Sarajevo with a native of the city, a female acquaintance about my age and from a similar social background who left Sarajevo during the first summer of the war but whose parents were still there. She showed me some of their letters describing the situation. When I asked what she thought about my doing fieldwork in Sarajevo, she not only endorsed the idea but suggested that I stay with her parents, who had an apartment in the center of the city. Some years later we laughed about this conversation when it became clear that we had both seen a chance to make use of each other. I gained an initial contact in Sarajevo, a place to stay, and local residents to show me around. What I did not know then was that her parents would become my war family, offering me a home that meant much more to me than the information they provided. She, in her turn, saw a way of sending letters, money, and food to her parents, which was her main preoccupation during those years in exile. Over time, this initial mutual interest has grown into a strong bond. Relationships forged in wartime on the basis of shared concerns and mutual trust are difficult to explain in civilian terms of friendship or family, but strong ties, formed quite quickly under trying circumstances, are characteristic of the social and emotional relationships that emerged in Sarajevo under siege.
Sarajevo
Ivo Andrić (2005 [1946]) opens his marvelous short story “Letter from the Year 1920” by describing a young man who has just returned to his native Sarajevo from abroad. Lying awake at night, the young man listens to bells ringing out of sync from a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox church, and a tower clock on Bey’s Mosque (Begova Džamija), and he dwells on the absence of a chime from the synagogue, which has no clock. It wakes intense contradictory feelings of both love and hatred for his hometown, and he agonizes over his decision to return. The story could have easily been written today. To outsiders, as well as on local television, Sarajevans pointed out proudly that from a single spot you could see the buildings of the city’s four dominant religions: the central mosque (Begova Džamija), the Catholic cathedral, the Orthodox cathedral, and the synagogue. During my first stay in Sarajevo, one of my new acquaintances took me to Bembaša hill in order to see this view. For Sarajevans, this scene was the physical embodiment of the blend of religious traditions that found their place in the unique concoction of culture, customs, beliefs, social skills, and dispositions that they experienced as characteristically Sarajevan
The capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina and an urban conglomeration with every important feature of a city, Sarajevo still felt like a town because of its social mixing and informality. It lies in a valley of the river Miljacka. Following the valley from its amphitheatric east to the plain in the west, the history of the city unfolds. Sarajevo was formed as a town around 1461, during Turkish times, and by 1660 it had become the largest city in the Balkans. All towns in the Ottoman Empire were structured by division into quarters, mahale (pl.), or distinct districts. Each mahala (sing.) belonged to a different religious congregation, with its characteristic place of worship. The larger religious groups had a larger number of mahale. Sarajevan mahale occupy the eastern, amphitheatric part of the city; the view shows a striking concentration of minarets and church towers. After the Hapsburg Empire annexed Bosnia in 1878, Austro-Hungarian architects began building to the west of the older Ottoman center. This phase of its growth makes downtown Sarajevo resemble any Central European city center from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. After World War II, expansion to the west continued. Yugoslav socialist architecture characterizes such buildings as the Parliament, the Holiday Inn, the UNIS twin skyscrapers (before the war popularly called “Momo” and “Uzeir” after Serb and Muslim characters in a humorous television series), the PTT (Post, Telegram, and Telephone) building, and the TV building. The modern suburbs of Grbavica, Hrasno, Čengić Vila, Alipašino polje, Neđarići, and Dobrinja grew here from 1960s on, as in other Yugoslavian and European cities. Different sorts of developments occurred on the slopes around the valley. In Velešići, Buča Potok, and Boljakov Potok, for example, villagers from Eastern Bosnia and Sandžak in Serbia moved in during the 1980s, giving the outskirts of the city a more rural look. In the west, where the valley merges with the plain, is the international airport—my point of entry into Sarajevo.
Map 1. Sarajevo under siege.
I had never been to Sarajevo before, and I had met only a few Sarajevans. I was familiar with the images of Bosnians that circulated in the former Yugoslavia. I had learned about Bosnian history and read Bosnian literature by such renowned novelists as Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović. I loved to sing Bosnian melancholic songs despite their patriarchal tone. I enormously enjoyed the popular prewar satirical program Top lista nadrealista (Top of the Surrealists) by a group of young Sarajevan men.12 I laughed at, and retold, jokes about Suljo, Mujo, and Fata, the stereotypical Muslim characters who figure in much of Bosnians’ self-deprecating humor.13
History and fiction taught me about the appalling brutality of the Ottoman occupiers toward the population. Boys were kidnapped to be trained as Ottoman soldiers, janjičari, a practice called danak u krvi, a tribute in blood. The history of Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the Inquisition and the European conquest of the rest of the world was no less bloody. Yet from the liberation of Sarajevo from the fascists by the partisans in 1945 until the dissolution of Yugoslavia, history was a horrific story firmly located in the past, bygone and never to return. When Franjo Tudjman, during his term as president of Croatia, said, “We live in historical times,” he was widely mocked not only for his pomposity but for his ignorance: while he was thinking of the heroic nature of Croatian nation-building, people were thinking of the misery that the nationalistic war had brought upon them. They would have been glad not to live in “historical times”!
The distinctive characteristic of Bosnians in general and Sarajevans in particular seems to have been—and still is—the shockingly lucid humor that flourished in the 1980s and continued throughout the war. No one who has seen it can forget a prewar sketch by the “Surrealists” in which Björn Borg comes as a refugee to Sarajevo because Sweden is at war with the penguins. Although no one recognizes him, people feel compassionate toward someone so far from home and try to help him the best they can. They find him a job in a coffee shop run by a Kosovo Albanian. His height, long blond hair, and incomprehensible speech make him look very stupid and out of place among the darker, shorter, and more alert Bosnians. At one point the kids in the street are playing tennis, and it turns out that Björn Borg is good at it. Everyone is happy for him and encourages him to keep it up! We all laughed at the absurdity of this upside-down situation, and no one could even dream that only a few years later forty thousand Bosnians would be seeking exile in Björn Borg’s native Sweden. In another prewar sketch, two stupid-looking street cleaners throw rubbish over a wall onto each other—a wall that was built in Sarajevo in order to separate the two warring sides and maintain the peace! At that moment, the Berlin Wall was falling and Europe was uniting. All these unimaginable reversals were true in the dream logic of night-mares—and soon became true in the “historical times” into which Sarajevans were unwillingly plunged.
The “Arrival Story”
Although war-torn Sarajevo was hardly a conventional anthropological field site, I could not help noticing certain resemblances—at least on the surface—to the fieldwork situation described in many a classical monograph (Pratt 1986). There was the “primitive other” whom we in the West did not understand, although in the case of Bosnia the “others” looked like us, were literate, and even spoke our languages. The colonial bureaucracy was present in the form of the UN. Life conditions were “primitive”: water was scarce and dirty, food was strange and difficult to get. Visitors were well advised to take their own provisions. There was no electricity. The utilities and comforts expected in a “civilized” place were lacking. The difference from the classical anthropological “bush” was that in Bosnia these conditions were situated within the remains of civilization, not outside of them. Bosnia had been part of Europe, but it seemed so no longer. Many westerners may have come to regard Bosnia as outside of Europe because they did not want to acknowledge that forces within their own societies and nation-states could lead to such a situation and were discomforted by the idea that they might be responsible for the city’s plight. Finally, there was the anthropologist as hero, entering the danger zone inhabited by “wild people” who were at war—a Hermes, to borrow Crapanzano’s metaphor (1986), a messenger between two worlds, the powerful, peaceful West and war-torn Sarajevo.
The road to Sarajevo, which started at the Croatian coast and then ran through territories under HVO and ABiH control, at the end passed through territory under the control of the Bosnian Serbs’ Army (Vojska Republike Srpske [VRS], Army of the Republika Srpska). In order for outsiders to reach Sarajevo by road, all three parties in the military conflict had to maintain a ceasefire. Whether formally negotiated or the result of stalemate and exhaustion, these intermissions in the fighting were unpredictable and highly unstable. The longest period that the UN-supervised routes called the “blue ways” were open was two or three months during the summer of 1994. Most often it was the Bosnian Serbs’ side that blocked land transports to Sarajevo. The ABiH and HVO were in conflict from late 1992 until early 1994, and during that time even the Bosnian Croats’ side blockaded the city. The Bosnian government’s side facilitated the passage of people and goods by using the tunnel under the airport, which was constructed because, even when the airport itself was under UN control, the UN denied passage to people seeking to enter and leave the city. Before the tunnel was dug, Sarajevans had to run across the runway hiding from the UN searchlights and the hail of bullets from Serbian snipers to reach the road into and out of Sarajevo. This tunnel was eight hundred meters long and it took thirty-five minutes to go through it, in a stooped position, with water up to one’s knees here and there. Only the energetic and determined could manage it, and even then they could not bring much baggage with them.
The airport was Sarajevo’s lifeline, but its capacity was very limited. In the autumn of 1994, there were military and diplomatic UN flights from Zagreb, humanitarian flights sponsored by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) that carried goods and personnel from Zagreb and Split, and flights that brought goods and journalists from Ancona, Italy. There were various types of UN identity cards, depending on the grounds for one’s accreditation. “Local personnel” included everyone who had a passport from one of the former Yugoslav republics. These cards conferred the same privileges as those held by “international personnel,” except that when sufficient space on a flight was not available the “international” card holder was given priority.14 No form of UN accreditation was granted to social researchers. The UN had an obligation to provide information, but letting journalists stay in war zones seemed to satisfy the foreign demand for information. The statement “Anthropologists Against Ethnic Violence” published in Anthropology Today in December 1993 and signed by some of the most prominent scholars in the discipline contends that the problem of access for researchers should be taken seriously and carried forward to the highest political levels: “It is the responsibility of anthropologists to expose the seductive simplicities which invoke primordial loyalties to ethnic origins. We can do this equally well by providing local knowledge as by formulating scientific statements. In any case, we must not shirk the responsibility of disputing the claims of demagogues and warning of the dangers of ethnic violence” (1993:28).
As a holder of a “local” passport, I decided that it would be safer for me to fly directly to Sarajevo and avoid various “national” checkpoints in Bosnia. In addition to contacting NGOs working in Bosnia, I tried to become accredited with the UNHCR as a researcher. The UNHCR informed me that it made contacts only with organizations, not private persons. This struck me as a peculiar statement, since it implied that I was doing research for personal reasons or private purposes. But my work was financed by the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (Forskningsrådsnämnden [FRN]), a public body to which I also reported my results. I had no choice but to obtain a journalist UN identity card, which I managed to do in Zagreb.
With the card in hand and in the company of Staffan Löfving, my Swedish friend and fellow anthropologist with a background in journalism, I set out for Split. But no flights were taking journalists to Sarajevo. We spent a day at the airport waiting for information along with a motley collection of characters, both local and international, who were also trying to reach Sarajevo, including journalists, humanitarian workers, and UN soldiers. Christian Palme, a correspondent for the largest Swedish daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, told us that there was no point in waiting in Split to get on a flight as a journalist; Ancona was a better bet. So we took a night ferry to Ancona.
It felt strange to travel through a foreign nation to reach a city in your own country, even though it had formally dissolved. It took an hour to get off the ferry, with the Italian police and customs officers asking everybody where we were going. They focused especially on people whose origins were in the former Yugoslavia, whom they suspected of seeking to enter Italy illegally. I felt really stupid saying that I was going “to Sarajevo,” trying to look as serious as possible and to make it sound like the most natural thing. Why else would people travel from Split to Ancona?
When we finally arrived at the airport in Ancona, it was practically empty. The airport in Sarajevo was closed because two UN aircraft had been fired on the day before when the pope was supposed to visit Sarajevo. The Serbian side would not guarantee his security, so the pope canceled his visit and most of the journalists went home. The day passed without shooting, and the next morning the UN decided to reopen the air bridge. Everything went surprisingly smoothly. Six people flew to Sarajevo in half-empty planes; I went on a German aircraft along with a journalist and a chess player from Sarajevo.
The UN provided transport from the airport into the city, directly to the UN Headquarters (HQ) in the PTT building in Alipašino polje. I remember seeing Sarajevans walking peacefully in the damaged suburbs, crosscut with protection walls made of rusty, splintered, and bullet-riddled cars. I was fascinated by people moving freely across the open spaces of this townscape that so obviously embodied the constant threat to life. Within a few days I was one of them, not really capable of grasping how this process of adaptation occurred, perhaps because it happened so quickly.
Multiple Key Informants
Leaving the security provided by the UN behind, I contacted the three families I was to visit and delivered the parcels I had brought for them from their relatives abroad. Our circle of acquaintances grew quickly and provided a rich source of informants. While in Split, we had borrowed flak jackets from an Irish priest who ran a Catholic NGO in Sarajevo. When we visited him in his office to return the jackets, he introduced us to a young Sarajevan man who worked with him and was happy to meet us later for a coffee. To this meeting he brought a young woman along, a friend of his. They were both Catholics, but while she was religious, he was not. With both of them I formed a friendship whose development seemed accelerated by wartime circumstances. In anthropological terms, they became key informants, explaining to me things I did not know or understand and obtaining information and contacts that I needed. At the same time, they invited me to their homes, took care of me as friends do, and spent their free time with me whenever it suited us. These war friendships might appear coincidental, but they were always based on mutual affinity. Most often they came about because of some common interest, experience, or ideals, but also because we seemed to share a sense of being outsiders.
Another chain of friendships came through Staffan, whose mother knew a refugee family from Sarajevo who was living in Sweden. Members of the family asked him to contact their good friend in Sarajevo and ask her to obtain copies of official documents for them. She received us in a warm and friendly manner, taking us to her offices and introducing us to her colleagues and neighbors. Gradually we also became war friends. She eventually told me that she had divorced her husband, a Bosnian Serb who was now living in Belgrade, and that their two teenage children had gone to Holland. Through her I met a woman in a neighboring family who had lived in Sweden as a child. We also became friends, and her husband was one of the few ex-soldiers I felt comfortable asking about his experiences as a soldier at the front lines.
All of the people who figure as informants in this analysis were ordinary residents of Sarajevo. I decided to focus on ordinary citizens because their experiences and knowledge of the war were not represented in either the media accounts or experts’ analyses of the conflict. The problem of describing a “limit situation,” of finding words for the incomprehensible and inexplicable situations that Sarajevans encountered in daily life, followed our work from the start. Almost everyone I asked for an interview answered that she or he did not have much to tell about the war. There was nothing to say. They had not experienced anything special. Many suggested that I should talk to refugees from Eastern Bosnia who had fled their homes under dramatic circumstances, those who had been in concentration camps, those who had left their aged, infirm parents behind or lost a child, those who had been raped and traumatized. This idea about research on war proves how deeply embedded the conventional notion of war is in all of us, Sarajevans as well as Western Europeans: civilians figure only as innocent and helpless victims of military forces, not as residents of a city under siege. I explained to everyone that I was not competent to conduct interviews with deeply traumatized persons; it would have made me no better than the journalists who exploited suffering in order to sell a story. They understood this explanation, and after I had reassured prospective informants that they did have a lot to tell about the war and that I would help them by asking specific questions, most agreed to meet me for an informal interview that I could tape-record—but only to be quoted anonymously in works I authored.
We usually started with the most obvious, seemingly simple things, such as how they provided themselves with food and heat. They described fantastically inventive solutions to wartime shortages. As our conversation continued and they mentioned those with whom they shared these daily struggles, I asked about family and old friends, about neighbors and new social contacts. In explaining their own choices, as well as trying to understand other people’s decisions, they necessarily touched upon subjects of national belonging, political ideologies, and religious beliefs. In this way, we jointly undertook the task of finding a language with which to describe the war.
Analyzing Cultural Change in Sarajevo
The structure of this book follows the processes through which normality was dissolved and reconstructed in various domains of Sarajevan life: material, psychological, social, ideological, and moral. Each chapter focuses on ways in which people coped with specific forces that were disrupting their lives and points to the contradictions that occurred in this process.
Part I scrutinizes life in Sarajevo under siege. The next chapter describes how Sarajevans dealt with imminent threats to their physical existence. Was it safer to run before the snipers, or to act as if they were not there? Was fear an enemy or a friend? Sarajevans’ coping strategies included psychological techniques that people utilize to imagine that they are in control of their surroundings when real control is out of their hands. At the same time, Sarajevans knew that calmly and realistically assessing the dangers was as crucial to survival as fooling your mind into feeling safe in life-threatening situations. Humor emerged as a way of keeping everything in perspective, no matter how absurd it seemed.
People’s most important concerns, after not getting shot, were not being cold and not going hungry. Fortunately, these were matters they could do something about; indeed, during the siege these tasks took enormous amounts of time and energy. Chapter 3 explores the concept of “imitation of life,” which Sarajevans used to describe their struggles to preserve the prewar norms and standards of material life under abnormal conditions, often through activities that were considered degrading. Risking your life to fetch the water required to keep up your personal hygiene as if in peacetime is an example of the desire at once to forget and to remain aware of the near total alteration of life, which generates humiliation and pride simultaneously. When thieving becomes a necessary means of survival and even religious bodies and international humanitarian agencies participate in the diversion and misappropriation of essential supplies, troubling moral questions unavoidably arise.
Social bonds that are the basic guarantees of security even in peacetime become more vital when other institutions, such as those provided by the state, break down or disappear, yet wartime conditions also strain more intimate ties of family and neighborhood. When half of the prewar population left the city, many long-standing bonds were broken, often painfully. The theme of Chapter 4 is the striking combination of pragmatism and intuition through which people reevaluated their old relationships and quickly established new ones.
Part II explores the transformation of identities and relationships by ethnonationalist movements. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 describe the massive political project of substituting ethnoreligious national identities for the former Yugoslav ideology of “brotherhood and unity.” Nationalistic leaders on all sides promoted animosity between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats and marginalized those who refused to identify with a single nationality. Although many Sarajevans resisted the pressure to make ethnoreligious identity the basis for the state, the war itself enforced the primacy of national identities. Political elites did not simply mobilize people on the basis of preexisting differences or exploit old antagonisms opportunistically in their pursuit of power; the war itself acted as a major force in making ethnonational identities count. In this sense, political violence was more the cause than the result of ethnoreligious conflict.
While Chapters 6 and 7 explore the mobilization of religion by ethnonationalistic ideology and its increased importance in everyday life in Sarajevo, Chapter 5 deals with the less well known, but equally important, political and economic transformation carried out by the new nationalistic elites. Under the veil of different ethnoreligious traditions, now claimed as the basis of nationalistic projects, the prewar social welfare system was dismantled and replaced by capitalism of a highly exploitative kind. In this transformation, too, international, nationalistic, and neoliberal organizations and interests proved to be important, and the moral questions that arose in this context concern us all, not only the people of Sarajevo.
How did Sarajevans respond to these socioeconomic and ideological changes? Chapter 8 traces the ways they reorganized their everyday interactions under these politically charged circumstances. During the war, when people met, they almost invariably began by identifying one another’s national identities. Even if they had known one another before, each assessed whether the other had changed as ethnoreligious identity became more salient. Behind the issue of national identity, though, lay more important questions: Was this person still worthy of trust? Could he or she be considered morally decent? Or had he or she crossed an ethical line beyond which further relation was morally impossible?
Finally, Chapter 9 moves to the front lines and then beyond them in the telling of the story of a middle-aged Sarajevan man who was at various points a civilian, a soldier, and a deserter. His is a fairly typical story, as this war conducted largely by nonstate armed forces against civilians by besieging the city blurred the distinctions that characterized conventional wars in the past. Here is a world in which the shock of war, the antagonistic logics of nationalism, and the moral imperative of taking responsibility for one’s own actions in an unpredictable world coexist. When we grasp the civilian, soldier, and deserter perspectives on war, and let the necessity of their contradictions enter our own world, we come to comprehend the war as Sarajevans experienced it. The Epilogue looks back at Sarajevo on the twelfth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, asking, as its residents and exiles do, what has become of Sarajevanness today.
