I did not insist on more meetings. I had a feeling that frequent visits from a stranger would have called attention to them in the neighborhood and aroused suspicious gossip.
Had I been of Serbian or Muslim origin, I would have been able to gather different material, but it would still have been incomplete and affected by my origin. As my host pointed out to me when I said that Croats seemed to be so negative toward Muslims while it was not the case the other way around: “You should only hear what your Muslims say about Croats in front of me!” Of course, I could imagine, because I knew what Croats were saying about Muslims and what Muslims were saying about Serbs, so it was unlikely that it would be any different the other way around.
The Ethics of Research on Suffering
I started my fieldwork during the Croatian war, spending two weeks in Zagreb and its surroundings in October 1991, and then one month in March 1993 traveling to Croatian and Herzegovinian front lines in Nova Gradiška, Dubrovnik, Ravno, Mostar, and Zadar. In the autumn of 1993 I spent three months in Zagreb preparing my way to Bosnia and interviewing Sarajevans who were in Zagreb at that time. Fieldwork in Sarajevo, which is central to this analysis, was conducted during five different periods: two weeks in September 1994; one month in March 1995; two weeks in September 1995; three months in the spring of 1996; and two weeks in September 1996. All in all, I spent six months in Sarajevo, and an additional six months in Croatia and Herzegovina.
My stays in Sarajevo were so short, especially in 1994 and 1995, because of the circumstances of the war and the limited duration of UN identity cards. When I once complained about not being able to spend a whole year in the field, as was conventional among anthropologists, my host told me that living in Sarajevo would make it impossible to do research. I could write a very good war diary, or even a novel, he said, but I could not do social-scientific research. I believe that he was right, because several times during my fieldwork I experienced the urge to abandon my research and do something more immediately useful. The rather abstract humanitarian project of documenting and analyzing people’s responses to political violence did not seem meaningful under the circumstances. I felt compelled to get a job that helped people directly, perhaps with a humanitarian agency or where I could use my skills in a more practical way. Many of my Sarajevan friends whose studies had been interrupted did useful work, which seemed to help them keep their balance. But then, I realized that, had I been a Sarajevan caught up in the war involuntarily, I would surely have done everything I could to leave the city, as many people of my generation and background actually did.
The constant awareness of life-threatening danger and the pressure of time demanded more emotional energy than long-term research in peacetime. As a native speaker sharing a similar prewar culture, I noticed small details on the streets, overheard conversations in cafés, and noticed the nuances in people’s expressions. Everything I saw or heard was material, and I was desperately trying to catch as much of it as I could. Working as well as living in Sarajevo under siege was so intense and exhausting that the only way I could relax a bit was to remember that I did not have to write detailed notes on my tape-recorded interviews while I was there.
After each of these periods in the field, I wrote and published articles in newspapers and scholarly journals. It was difficult to find my way through all these experiences, interviews, and written materials and figure out what was most important to say about the war in Sarajevo. Had I not done the analysis along the way, I dare say that the task of writing about the war would have been overwhelming. Working out the analysis gradually, between periods in Sarajevo, provided me with a fairly clear structure by the time I finished the fieldwork in 1996.
Still, the periods I spent out of the field were burdened not only with the usual adjustment to different living conditions and social circles but also with fear that something terrible might happen to the people I cared about in Sarajevo and a clear awareness of how utterly powerless I was to help them. When I had a respite from the traumatic situation for the time being and was safe in Sweden, I was beset by a diffuse post-traumatic depression and stress. Only after the war was over and the situation in Sarajevo was more secure did this sense of constant apprehension lift.
When I first sought to enter Bosnia, in the autumn of 1993, the situation was very bad. The fighting between the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Armija Bosne i Hercegovine) [ABiH] and the Croat Defense Council (Hrvatsko vijeće obrane) [HVO] made traveling as a private person from Zagreb to Sarajevo almost impossible. The country was full of checkpoints held by all sorts of military formations. Only Bosnians fleeing from the war were desperate enough to run the risks. The only viable option for entering the country was to travel with a UN accreditation. The UN was the only neutral military force in the region, with relatively good logistics, and it enabled a limited number of accredited civilians to move into and out of Bosnia. Most of the accreditations were held by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) recognized by the UN, humanitarian workers, and journalists. Although passengers had to sign a form saying that the UN had no obligation to them and that they were traveling at their own risk, this option was still the safest. I became well acquainted with people in NGOs recognized by the UN, but they used their accreditations to enable Bosnian staff members to travel out of the war zone to strengthen contacts and have a brief respite from the war. The rationale for the UN’s decision to restrict the number of people it helped to move into and out of Bosnia was to limit civilian casualties. The effect, however, was further isolation of the country, which suited the leaders of the warring sides and increased the suffering of the population.
Human rights and peace activists in Zagreb were cautious about traveling to Bosnia for ethical reasons as well. Many felt that they should do so only if they could ameliorate the situation in some concrete way. Foreign journalists who found a civil war in Europe intriguing and wanted to make fast and flashy accounts of it frequently called on activists in Zagreb for assistance. One journalist from Australia demanded to talk on the phone with an English-speaking woman who had been raped during the war in Bosnia. This sort of voyeuristic sensationalism and exploitation of victims caused revulsion among activists. The episode made me think about my motivations for doing fieldwork during the war. I felt compelled to find out about the war in the former Yugoslavia not because my life was boring and I was looking for stimulation but because my whole world was falling apart and I had to understand it in order to put it together again, even if only partially. I did not know whether conducting an ethnographic study of the siege of Sarajevo would be useful in any way, but I remained convinced that giving voice to the civilians whose experiences were left out of war accounts justified my working there.
During the years of my intermittent visits to Sarajevo, I questioned this reason many times. In the spring of 1995, when the situation in Sarajevo was deteriorating after a long period of relative quiet, I felt totally powerless. I tried to do something more practical for the people I had become attached to, who were once again at the mercy of destructive forces beyond their reach. I thought that since I could travel in and out of the city, I could do something they could not do for themselves. I was wrong. True, I could record their story and eventually share it with the world, but at the time that did not seem to matter. Nothing they or I did could make any real difference. After I left Sarajevo in late March, I just had to sit and wait for reports of Sarajevo being shelled. Overwhelmed by frustration, I fought an inner battle not to give up, not to let my work drown in a flood of meaninglessness and depression. I clung to the idea that documenting the war from an anthropological perspective must be worth while, and that proved to be my lifeline. As I thought of the people I left in Sarajevo, I knew that my being there off and on did not make much difference, but it was a change from the monotony of their wartime existence. My visits broke through their isolation from the rest of the world, which was killing their spirits more surely than shells and bullets. Through me they could hear about their relatives and friends abroad, receive a letter, and get a tiny present containing something that they had not seen since the beginning of the siege. Perhaps I could be a part of their lifeline.
Figure 2. My hosts’ daughter made a collage with my face on
