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
