The New Bosnian Mosaic

Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society

Elissa Helms, Xavier Bougarel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317023074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the violent events of the Bosnian war and the revelations of ethnic cleansing that shocked the world in the early 1990s, Bosnia has become a metaphor for the new ethnic nationalisms, for the transformation of warfare in the post-Cold War era, and for new forms of peacekeeping and state-building. This book is unique in offering a re-examination of the Bosnian case with a 'bottom-up' perspective. It gathers together cultural anthropologists and other social scientists to consider the specificities of the Bosnian case. However, the book also raises broader questions: what are the consequences of internecine violence and how should societies attempt to overcome them? Are the uncertainties and the transformations of Bosnian post-war society due entirely to the war, or are they related to wider processes encompassing post-communist Europe as a whole? And are the difficulties experienced by international state-building operations mainly due to distinctive features of the local societies or are they due to the policies promoted by the international community itself?

PART 1
Beyond ‘Ethnicity’

Chapter 1

‘Imitation of Life’: Negotiating Normality in Sarajevo under Siege

Ivana Maček

Introduction1

During my fieldwork in Sarajevo in 1994 and 1995 I found that people often used the concept of ‘normality’ in order to describe some situation, person, or their way of living. The concept was charged with a sense of morality, of what was good, right or desirable. A ‘normal life’ was a description of how people wanted to live, and a ‘normal person’ was a person who thought and did things people found acceptable. Thus, ‘normality’, in its locally understood meaning, communicated social norms according to the person using it, and as such also often indicated her ideological position.

When used as an analytical concept, as I use it here, it is important to bear in mind that social norms are always in a process of change. Each member of a society continuously defines and redefines her/his norms of conduct and perception of reality in accordance with her/his daily experiences. This process, which I refer to as ‘negotiation’ for lack of a better term, can exist unnoticed, and it is not seldom that the people involved perceive ‘normality’ as a stable entity. Indeed, an essential feeling that ‘this is how things really are’, seems to be tremendously important in creating a feeling of security. The human need for security can, in turn, be used by actors in a political arena to promote their own versions of reality, and consequently those with more power have more to say about what normality is.

By highlighting the process of negotiating normality in violent circumstances I want to give an outline of, and suggest a way of interpreting, life in Sarajevo during the war. The interpretation is grounded in research conducted in the last decade by social scientists working in similar circumstances of systematic violence against civilians, as well as in my own experiences from Sarajevo.

Between Chaos and Resistance

When members of a society are exposed to systematic physical destruction, or a fear of it, the normality of their daily lives as they lived them in peaceful times is seriously jeopardized. In wars where civilians and civilian lives are the main targets of destruction, the destruction of normality stretches itself through all levels of social life. As Carolyn Nordstrom has shown for the cases of Sri Lanka and Mozambique,

Maimed bodies and ruined villages are obvious casualties of dirty wars. Maimed culture – including crucial frameworks of knowledge – and ruined social institutions are not as visible, but they are equally powerful realities and their destruction might have a much more enduring and serious impact than the more obvious gruesome casualties of war. (Nordstrom 1992: 261; emphasis added)

The destruction, however, rarely happens suddenly and totally. Rather, the lives people are used to living are disrupted gradually and continuously. This leaves space for people to come to terms with the disruptions: to feel them, to think about them, to explain them, and to find their own ways of acting – in other words, to negotiate their normality.

Michael Taussig’s Nervous System (Taussig 1992) is a distressing account of such social processes in a ‘true state of emergency’, to use his words. The expression stands not only for the effects of Colombian state terrorism on civilian life, but also characterizes a global phenomenon. Central to Taussig’s account are notions of ‘terror as usual’ and ‘normality of the abnormal’ which ‘requires knowing how to stand in an atmosphere of whipping back and forth between clarity and opacity, seeing both ways at once’ (Taussig 1992: 17). He continues:

I am referring to a state of doubleness of social being in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into disorientation by an event, a rumour, a sight, something said, or not said – something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it. (Taussig 1992: 18; emphasis added)

Characteristic of the type of wars described in this chapter is the initial notion of chaos and abnormality. In such circumstances of permanent insecurity, each small incident that disrupts normality produces an ontological and epistemological vacuum (Nordstrom 1992: 261, 267-8). This condition stays for a shorter or longer period of time until the disruption is dealt with, interpreted, understood, and normality is re-established.

Taking examples from World War II, Elaine Scarry posits that this enables implantation of new ‘truths’, explanations of events and reality, by those who hold power over the destruction (Scarry 1985). As the cases from Latin American ‘dirty wars’ show (Green 1999; Suárez-Orozco 1992; Taussig 1992), an individual’s struggle to make sense of her situation and the world around is indeed subjected to the ‘truths’ defined by politico-military elite. But people do not just automatically accept new explanations, ideas and norms. It is better to say that the negotiation of normality takes place in a political space where the power over defining ‘truth’ is highly contested.

In his Grammar of Terror, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (1992) describes the stages of reaction to systematic terror to which civilians were subjected during the Argentinean ‘dirty war’. The first reaction was a denial that people were disappearing. Then came rationalizations for why somebody had disappeared, which implied that this could not happen to oneself. Coping with the loss of a loved one without knowing her destiny also caused reactions of anger against the authorities held responsible or anger turned inward in the form of depression, ‘mummification’ of the disappeared person’s belongings, and eventually acceptance of the situation. This is the state where people are full of doubts about what is true and real, which produces still more fear and a withdrawal into one’s own shell of privacy. ‘Every possibility is a fact’ (Taussig 1992: 34) and paranoia becomes social theory and social practice.

Still in the domain of the private, when terror becomes the order of the day (‘terror as usual’ in Taussig’s words), the shared experience of survival often turns into ‘despair and macabre humour’ (Taussig 1992: 18). This, like the sharing of trauma among women in Guatemala through talk about their sicknesses (Green 1999), is the first sign of resistance to the imposed order of terror. When experiences, traumas, desires and ideas get expressed – voiced – they become shared. The forms of expression can be various: humour, jokes, poetry, rock-music, paintings, theatre or talking about sicknesses. The naming of the trauma is not only a form of resistance but can also be a way of healing.

Material Uncertainty, Humiliation and Shame

If I have three children, I shall call them Electricity, Water, and Gas!

– a ten-year old boy in Sarajevo

It is not hard to understand the basic needs for food, water and some source of energy for the sustenance of bare physical life. Because of their basic and obvious nature, I perceived the problems of providing them as fairly banal, and yet, I found myself from the very beginning very attentive to whether water or electricity would come at some point of the day. On the days when this happened, my fieldnotes inevitably begun with something like: ‘Today around twelve o’clock I heard the water coming on…’ The explanation for this preoccupation lies in the fact that these things were necessary for physical survival. More importantly, however, it points us to a phenomenon necessary for understanding the war in Sarajevo: everyday uncertainty.

Characteristic of the war situation in Sarajevo was the scarcity and irregular availability of life-sustaining basics rather than a total lack of them. This was one of the central strategies used against ordinary life and the civilian population in this war. Whether aware of its effects on the population or not, authorities from both warring sides alternated between cutting off and letting through supplies to the population as a way to reach their goals (which most often appeared to be military or political). This caused confusion among the people of Sarajevo. I was told that all the cables and pipelines went through Serb-held territories, which meant that the Serb side could easily cut Sarajevo off completely. Thus, people wondered why the Serb side sometimes let them have electricity, water and gas. As the war went on, many Sarajevans lost their illusions about how much their own government cared about them. In September 1994 people were convinced that it was not only ‘the Serbs’ but also their own government that was causing the cuts. The general opinion was that this was done in order to victimize the population of Sarajevo and thus gain points in the international political arena.

The effect of these ‘strategies’ was that any daily routine became impossible. During the periods when there was no water at all, whole days went to queuing up at the cisterns and then transporting the water home. Often in freezing temperatures, under random shell fire, accompanied by the physical hardships of transporting water and the emotional exposure to the nervous, depressed or angry outbursts of fellow citizens, the experience of accessing water in Sarajevo became engraved in people’s bodies and memories as something to avoid at all costs. Everyone therefore waited eagerly for the occasional sound of water starting to drip from the taps in order to catch every precious drop. This usually did not last for more than half an hour, nor did it happen every day, but still the waiting was worth it. Anything to avoid water queues.

The same happened with random electricity supplies once the electricity started coming. These were people who were forced to spend long winter evenings by the light of one precious candle or the weak light of a small bulb powered by a car battery; people whose homes were filled with modern electrical appliances that sat useless for more than two years; people who were tired of washing clothes by hand in tiny quantities of precious water; people who were ashamed of their homes which had once been vacuumed weekly: these people welcomed every second of electricity in order to re-establish the standard of living they considered decent.

The occasional arrival of water and electricity made people feel that they were able to live more normally, that is normally according to pre-war standards. Its randomness, on the other hand, had a disastrous effect on their coping with the situation. For example, a young woman told me that her mother used to leave the bathroom light on so that if the electricity were to come on during the night (as it often did during the initial period), she would wake up and be able to vacuum. When the electricity came on one night at three o’clock in the morning, the daughter, too, woke up. She saw that her mother was too tired to do any work so she begged her to go to bed. The woman returned to her bed, but she could not give up the idea and could not fall asleep for a long time.

In the family where I lived I witnessed similar situations. One day the water and electricity came on at the same time. For anyone in charge of a household this felt like winning the lottery and my hostess’ reaction was no different. Although she knew that both the water and electricity could disappear any second, this was her happy moment and she hurried to start the washing machine. As predicted, it was less than half an hour before the power for the machine disappeared again and she ended up rinsing everything by hand.

Interestingly, these conditions persisted even after the final ceasefire was declared; it was thus no longer directly connected to the military situation. In October 1995 I noticed a calendar in the kitchen of one of my friends in Sarajevo. It was filled with small notes. My friend explained that her father had marked the days when the authorities had said there would be water, electricity or gas. The scheme was very complicated but it was possible to work out on which days one would have, for instance, both water and electricity so that laundry could be planned for that day. A month later, water, electricity and gas were once again cut off, coming on just occasionally and randomly.

Being forced in this manner into a state of waiting and complete subordination to the whims of destiny, or the authorities, the unpredictability became incorporated into every person, and the alertness to the coming of water, electricity and gas became a survival instinct. The message that slowly but surely engraved itself into people was that they had no power over their lives. Consequently, they started feeling that their lives were worthless and that they could not understand the logic governing them.

Important to note in this process are feelings of shame. When talking about their situation Sarajevans would not only use the notion of ‘normal life’ but also express the shame they felt: because they could not invite me for a decent (normal) meal, because their homes were not as tidy as they wanted them to be, because they had lost their dignity by losing control over their lives and destinies, or because they no longer cared if somebody had been killed that day (as long as it was not somebody they knew).

Scarcity and irregular availability not only affected water, electricity and gas, but also food and wood – although the question of how these were supplied was different in character because humanitarian aid and the ‘black-market’ were involved (Maček 2000: 86). Before the war, the population of Sarajevo had been used to a standard of living which generally coincided with that of any Western city of the same size (about half a million). During the first year of the war almost all Sarajevans went from being fully employed professionals providing a decent standard of living for themselves and their families to being charity recipients dependent upon the good will of a range of organisations (from the United Nations, Western NGOs, religious relief organisations such as Caritas and Merhamet, to Islamic humanitarian NGOs coming mostly from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). Examples I am about to give show how shame can gradually turn into the (normal) state of things, which indicates that a change in what is considered to be normal has taken place.

The couple I was staying with were university educated people in their late fifties. Throughout their lives they had been able to provide for themselves a decent living that included much more than basic food provision. Even during the first months of the war they had been able to buy their own food and fuel (that is wood or coal, needed when the electricity and gas were cut off). They simply could not face the humiliation of receiving ‘mercy from foreigners’, as they expressed their view on humanitarian aid. Queuing for hours in the cold and under the threat of shelling in order to be given a few kilograms of food that would only last a few days was unthinkable. But after some months their reserves of Deutschmarks (DM) were gone, and they were compelled to apply for help from foreigners as if they were charity cases. It was a public statement of their social degradation caused by the war. By September 1994 when I stayed with them in Sarajevo for the first time, queuing for humanitarian aid was a part of their everyday life. They explained the original humiliation they felt but it no longer bothered them.

On the other hand, they still refused to take charity from ‘šejhovi’ (‘sheikhs’), private donors from Muslim countries in whose name bread was occasionally distributed free of charge. They preferred to use their own precious flour and yeast, spending almost a whole day walking to the house of a relative who had a wood-burning oven in order to bake their own bread. They also had to use up valuable coal and were obliged to somehow return the service to the relative later on. They could still afford it, however, so they refused charity from the ‘šejhovi’. Receiving help in the name of Allah was perceived as much more degrading than losing social status. If there was a social logic behind it, then it must be that one could become poor and still live in the same society with the same norms, whilst accepting charity in Allah’s name would, for my secularized hosts, mean accepting another kind of society with a whole range of different norms.

The question I asked myself at that time was how long it would take before my hosts would have to accept this sort of charity. The answer can perhaps be given through another example of a friend of mine who was a medical doctor and from a Catholic Sarajevan family. From our first meeting in September 1994, she commented from time to time on the proliferation of Islam in civil and official everyday life, most often brought by ‘Arabs’, which she found disturbing. When I visited in October 1995, Saudi Arabia had established a new donation to medical doctors in Sarajevo who had been...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Figures
• List of Acronyms
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Pronunciation Guide
• Introduction
• Part 1 Beyond ‘Ethnicity’
• Part 2 Beyond ‘Ancient Hatred’
• Part 3 Beyond ‘Protectorate’
• Bibliography
• Index