Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
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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