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
