Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
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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