Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
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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.
Chapter 2
Death and Creativity in Wartime
Culture is after that permanence and durability which life, by itself, so sorely misses.
—Zygmunt Bauman, 1992
The fundamental difference between peacetime and wartime is that in war death and destruction are massive and unremitting. War acquires an all-encompassing quality that makes peace inconceivable. During our lives, we go through periods of confusion in which our understanding of the world does not help us to organize our experiences in a meaningful way. In peacetime we describe this unstable state as a life crisis. We wonder whether life has meaning when its predestination is death. Culture is central to the ways people create meaning in the face of death. In Western culture many have found death meaningful because it marks the limit of our existence and in that way makes it possible to grasp.1 A life without limits is formless, an endless continuum or even a vacuum. Death enables us to define ourselves, and our mortality is an essential dimension of our identity. We deal with life crises and with death though our capacity to create new meanings in our profoundly altered situation.
When our civilian expectations of life are shattered by war, we search for ways to organize our shocking encounters with violence. However, even the most convincing explanations of “whose fault it is” and “which side is mine” are seldom long-lived in a war zone, as none of the warring sides provide protection and justice. When social institutions dissolve and meanings disappear, we use the full array of our cultural resources and inventiveness in order to make sense of our wartime existence.
Wartime conditions do not facilitate creativity, as Carolyn Nordstrom has pointed out (1997:15). Our capacity for making meaning often proves useless when we are confronted with the sudden terror of violent death and destruction. Mass murder is incomprehensible. While in peacetime we gradually reassess our situation in order to come to terms with death and loss, in wartime we must balance between acknowledging and ignoring the life-threatening circumstances in which we exist. Being too aware of the very real dangers we face inhibits our capacities not only to make sense of our situation and respond to it creatively but even to cope with it from one moment to the next. When meanings evaporate as soon as we have imagined them, when whatever map of the new world we construct is shattered as soon as we construct it, we find ourselves in a “limit situation.”
The experience of chaos that was characteristic of Sarajevans’ struggle to recreate normality during the siege, as well as their constant oscillation between knowing and not-knowing, was a typical limit situation, resembling the Holocaust and other instances of massive political violence. In limit situations the scale