A night in Sarajevo – Fostering good relations

Alison, Diane, Pat, and I finished our lunch and returned to the hotel for a brief rest before our group was to gather in the lobby. We were happy to find Geanie and Judy safe and sound. I’d like to say we had a hearty laugh about accidentally losing Judy but I don’t recall that being the case.

Damir had set up a meeting with yet another Sarajevan, Almir, so we might have a colloquy with him about his war experience and, we hoped, learn a bit about the political situation in B&H today. We’d heard from our city guides about their war experiences – and some of what they told us was quite harrowing – but, as I’ve noted before, they had both lived through the war as teens. Almir would provide an adult’s perspective.

One statement we heard repeatedly and regardless of nationality, is something I have tried to convey through omission. It’s that the 1991-1995 Balkan Wars were not civil wars. They are certainly not viewed as such by the people with whom we interacted and, in a sense, theirs is the true interpretation.

Although Yugoslavia consisted of six republics (much as the United States consists of 50 states), the 1974 constitution established a legitimate mechanism for any or all of them to declare their independence or effectively secede from the union (a mechanism the U S lacks). Each of the republics that subsequently declared independence did so through the referendum process required by that constitution making each declaration of independence legitimate under the law. Since these sequential secessions were legitimate, it would be improper to cast the wars that followed as civil wars. They were wars between sovereign, independent, and internationally recognized nations.

For many of the citizens of B&H, and particularly for the residents of Sarajevo, the notion that there could be a civil war or a situation where the three ethnic groups might turn against one another bordered, perhaps, on being incomprehensible. From an outsider’s perspective and through the retrospective lens of history, even their war looks nearly as inevitable as all the others.

So why didn’t the war seem inevitable to the Bosnians?

Recall that from its earliest days, Sarajevo was a multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant city without a formal or even informal ghetto. Jews and Muslims happily lived as literal neighbors. (Please don’t read this as though I’m trying to depict Sarajevo as some sort of utopian paradise but it was unique not only on the peninsula but in all of Europe regarding this sort of comfortable cohabitation particularly in those early times.)

Sarajevo is made up of four municipalities (Centar, Novi Grad, Novo Sarajevo, and Stari Grad). In a 1991 census, three of the four municipalities had majority Muslim populations with only the Old City or Stari Grad being substantially Muslim at nearly 78 percent. Overall, just more than half of the inhabitants identified as Bosniaks, a quarter as Serbs, 13 percent as Yugoslavs, 7 percent as Croats, and a bit more than 4 percent as other.

[Photo from City of Sarajevo website.]

The census supports this picture of a relatively balanced distribution of ethnic groups across the city. Thus, even as the extreme nationalist rhetoric – particularly from Serbia – raised the temperature of fear and intolerance, Sarajevans had no real gauge to measure that sort of heat. Fear and intolerance were alien to the everyday experiences of most of them and the violent breakdown of comity was apparently inconceivable to many. So, they stayed.

It was this sense of amity and cooperation that Almir (standing in the corner in the photo at top) tried repeatedly to convey. Even during the siege, he told us, neighbors continued to help and support each other while disregarding the other’s religion. The demographics above, I think, provide one of the two main pillars supporting Almir’s description. The other is the repeated insistent assertions of the people we met 25 years later that this was the case. So, they stayed.

In spite of the evidence of broad ethnic cleansing being reported from other Serbian assaults, they couldn’t conceive that such a fate awaited their city. They couldn’t believe their homes and places of worship would be confiscated or destroyed in an effort to erase their presence from history. So, they stayed.

In a previous post I mentioned that the Dayton peace accord “while probably being among the most impressive achievements and examples of conflict resolution ever crafted, left in place an unwieldy governing system that should have been transitional and somehow forced the parties back to the negotiating table because the structure it left in place continues to retard the development of B&H to this day.” In short, the governing structure created by the Dayton agreement is, in itself, inherently obstructive. Whether the scars of the war are still too fresh or the seeds of nationalism sown in the nineties will prove deeply rooted for generations, the lack of political cooperation is an indicator that if the pre-war days were amicable, that same level of amity no longer exists.

[Photo from City of Sarajevo website.]

The truth likely lies in the middle of the two views and would certainly be undiscoverable in a three-day visit to the capital. In B&H, and even in the more ethnically monolithic nations of the former Yugoslav republics, times are not easy. And in difficult times, people often view the past through a nostalgic mist that obscures the reality. Additionally, it’s been my experience that people are generally reluctant to expose the troubled parts of their national landscape to outsiders. This is natural and understandable. The Bosnians want us to view their country sympathetically and in a positive light in the same way that the Croats, Slovenians, or Serbs would. I think had we spent time in Serbia rather than Bosnia, the Serbians would have presented quite a different view of the landscape of the war.

Still, after spending so much of the day exposed to deprivation and slaughter, Almir’s comments (even if Damir chose him to speak with us because Almir would make the most positive presentation to a group of tourists) were a welcome sense of solace that set the table for the rest of the night. As was his sense of optimism.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the full explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.