Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage

Helen Walasek, contributions by Richard Carlton, Valery Perry, Tina Wik, Amra Hadžimuhamedović

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409437048
• eBook ISBN: 9781317172987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The massive intentional destruction of cultural heritage during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War targeting a historically diverse identity provoked global condemnation and became a seminal marker in the discourse on cultural heritage. It prompted an urgent reassessment of how cultural property could be protected in times of conflict and led to a more definitive recognition in international humanitarian law that destruction of a people's cultural heritage is an aspect of genocide. Yet surprisingly little has been published on the subject. This wide-ranging book provides the first comprehensive overview and critical analysis of the destruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina's cultural heritage and its far-reaching impact. Scrutinizing the responses of the international community during the war (including bodies like UNESCO and the Council of Europe), the volume also analyses how, after the conflict ended, external agendas impinged on heritage reconstruction to the detriment of the broader peace process and refugee return. It assesses implementation of Annex 8 of the Dayton Peace Agreement, a unique attempt to address the devastation to Bosnia's cultural heritage, and examines the treatment of war crimes involving cultural property at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). With numerous case studies and plentiful illustrations, this important volume considers questions which have moved to the foreground with the inclusion of cultural heritage preservation in discussions of the right to culture in human rights discourse and as a vital element of post-conflict and development aid.

Chapter 1
Destruction of the Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Overview

Helen Walasek

Patterns of Destruction

The scale of the devastation of the cultural and religious heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War was extensive. The exceptional defining feature of the devastation was the systematic and deliberate nature of the attacks. Thus, the greater part of the destruction occurred as the result of the intentional targeting of cultural property, rather than from collateral damage inflicted during the course of battle. These premeditated attacks were a fundamental part of violent attempts to create mono-ethnic territories by the process known as ethnic cleansing,¹ while in cities like Sarajevo and Mostar structures and institutions that symbolized or contained material proofs of Bosnia’s historic pluralist identity were targeted. Thus the destruction could be seen as assaults on the physical evidence of co-existence and heterogeneity.

There were two principal phases of destruction of cultural and religious property. The first followed the outbreak of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina² in March 1992 as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by secessionist Bosnian Serbs supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Serbian paramilitary units against non-Serb populations in their efforts to consolidate the territory of an ethnically ‘pure’ Serb para-state of Republika Srpska.³ However, sporadic attacks on non-Serb religious property by the JNA had begun even earlier. Probably the first such attack was the dynamiting of the eighteenth-century Ljubović Mosque in Odžak near Nevesinje by JNA troops on the night of 23–24 September 1991.

By autumn 1992 the Bosnian Serbs held 70 per cent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the targets of their ethnic cleansing operations were Bosnian Muslims/Bosniaks (demographically the most numerous) and Bosnian Croats (who traditionally formed the majority in areas like the Bosanska Posavina along the south bank of the Sava River).⁴ Attacks on Islamic (Muslim) and Roman Catholic (Croat) sacral structures were frequently tied with the murders of clerics and parishioners, as well as other atrocities and human rights abuses.⁵

The 43-month siege of Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo by JNA/Bosnian Serb (VRS)⁶ forces began, a notable feature of which were the attacks on the city’s major cultural institutions and historic monuments. The most notorious was the bombardment of the Vijećnica (National Library)⁷ with incendiary shells over the night of 25–26 August 1992. Mostar was subjected to intensive JNA/VRS shelling between mid-April to mid-May 1992 causing considerable damage to its built heritage, particularly in the historic core. There were reprisal attacks on Orthodox/Serb religious property, principally by Bosnian Croat/HVO forces,⁸ in the Posavina to the north and in Herzegovina, where in mid-June the important monuments of Žitomislić monastery and the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral (Saborna Crkva) in Mostar were destroyed.

The second phase of significant destruction of cultural property followed the announcement of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan in January 1993 which proposed to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into mono-ethnic cantons, encouraging separatist Bosnian Croat forces (HVO) to begin attacking their Bosnian government allies in an attempt to gain territory for an ethnically ‘pure’ Croat para-state of Herceg-Bosna with Mostar as its capital. Here again, ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslim populations⁹ by HVO/Bosnian Croat forces was accompanied by the wide-scale devastation chiefly of Ottoman/Islamic, but also of Orthodox/Serb religious and cultural heritage. It was during this phase that the historic Ottoman urban complex of Stolac in Herzegovina was intentionally destroyed by HVO/Bosnian Croat extremists beginning in July 1993 after the forcible internment of the entire male Muslim population of military age and the expulsion of the remainder. This so-called Croat-Muslim War was epitomized by the deliberate assaults on the historic Ottoman core of Mostar (especially on the government-held east bank of the Neretva River) during the HVO siege of the town that began in May 1993. The zenith of this devastation was the premeditated shelling of the Stari Most (Old Bridge) which finally collapsed into the Neretva River on 9 November 1993.

Meanwhile, in Bosnian Serb-controlled territories, destruction continued into 1993 with the systematic dynamiting of Bijeljina’s and Banja Luka’s mosques and Islamic/Ottoman heritage by Bosnian Serb authorities/VRS forces, as well as, for instance, the demolition of such important monuments as the Osman-paša Mosque in Trebinje, the Careva/Obradovića Mosque in Bileća, the Avdić Mosque in Plana and the Esma Sultana/Čaršija Mosque in Jajce. Thus the greater part of cultural heritage destruction (though not all) took place during 1992–1993.

There was relatively little destruction in 1994, but 1995 saw a further spate of attacks on religious property. Some were prompted by the retaking of Serb-held territory in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and were focused on Roman Catholic religious structures in Republika Srpska (by this time almost all Islamic structures in the territory had been completely destroyed or were in a ruinous state). In July mosques in the UN-protected ‘safe areas’ of Srebrenica and Žepa were destroyed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran the two enclaves and after the towns were empty of their Muslim inhabitants. In the final months of the war as the forces of the HVO, Croatian and Bosnian Armies advanced, a number of Orthodox religious structures were attacked and damaged. But all the destruction of 1995 amounts to a fraction of the destruction which took place over 1992 and 1993.

Analysis of the built heritage destroyed or badly damaged during the conflict shows that the types of monuments attacked were overwhelmingly religious,¹⁰ and of those, structures were overwhelmingly Muslim – many from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian periods. Of non-religious structures, similarly, those destroyed or damaged were largely Ottoman period, associated with Muslims, or were structures or institutions which represented Bosnia-Herzegovina’s historic pluralism or held records of centuries of co-existence. Scores of secular buildings without ethno-national/ethno-religious affiliation were targeted (especially in Sarajevo and Mostar), particularly structures from the Austro-Hungarian period, where many institutions and official bodies (cultural and otherwise), archives, libraries, museums and headquarters of infrastructure bodies were housed. However, although Muslim/Ottoman sacral and secular monuments particularly suffered attack, there was also widespread destruction and damage to the Catholic (Croat) and Orthodox (Serb) religious heritage.

A proportion of the intentional targeting of cultural and religious property by artillery shelling took place in the context of long-running sieges, the best known being the attack on the Vijećnica (National Library, 1896) and the destruction of the Stari Most (Old Bridge, 1566) mentioned above. Other examples of this type of intentional targeting (often with incendiary shells) were the Oriental Institute (1891) and the Olympic Museum (Villa Mandić, 1903) in Sarajevo and the Franciscan church of Ss Peter and Paul in Mostar (1866). The famous dervish tekke (tekija) at Blagaj which stands at the base of the sheer cliff from which the Buna river emerges was targeted from HVO positions, apparently with rockets; the missiles struck the cliff face, causing rocks to fall onto the roof of the building below.¹¹

However, by far the greatest percentage of deliberate targeting had a distinct feature: it did not occur during military operations, but rather took place in locales either far from the frontlines or where fighting had ceased and were in secure control of the perpetrators of the destruction. Thus, in Bosnian Serb-controlled Banja Luka, where there were no hostilities at any time, 15 mosques¹² along with other Ottoman/Islamic structures were destroyed between April and December 1993 – a year and more after the conflict had started.

The destruction began on 9 April 1993 with the demolition of the small Bosnian style Sefer-beg (Pećinska) Mosque with its wooden minaret.¹³ Twelve of Banja Luka’s 15 mosques were listed national monuments dating from the Ottoman period and included the domed Ferhadija (1579) and Arnaudija (1594/95) mosques, both of which were blown up during the early hours of 7 May 1993.¹⁴ The previous day, Đurđevdan (St George’s Day), an important marker of Serb ethno-national identity, had been celebrated and Bedrudin Gušić, Chairman of the Islamic Community in the city during the war, has related how Banja Luka’s remaining Muslims, headed by their Mufti Ibrahim Halilović who had remained in the city to help and try to protect his parishioners, feared some kind of attack.¹⁵ Late that night at around 23.00, police cordoned off roads near the historic mosques; some living in nearby houses and apartments, apparently alerted to the coming blast, had left their windows opened wide. The huge explosions which rocked the city just after 03.00 were so great some residents believed a munitions depot had blown up.¹⁶

Yet the minaret of the stone-built Ferhadija, the city’s most beautiful and celebrated mosque, remained standing – probably as Sabira Husedžinović (then an expert working at the Banja Luka Institute for the Protection of Cultural, Historical and Natural Heritage) believed, because of the internal steel frame added to the minaret during rehabilitation work in 1989.¹⁷ Late on the night of 7 May in an attempt to legitimize their actions, the Bosnian Serb authorities tried to persuade Bedrudin Gušić to sign a document drawn up by a hastily-formed official ‘Commission’ stating that in its semi-destroyed state the minaret of the Ferhadija posed a danger to public safety and needed to be demolished.¹⁸ But Gušić refused to sign. Back at home, at about 23.30, he saw spotlights trained on the ruins of the Ferhadija and knew the inevitable was about to happen. At half past midnight on 8 May amid cheers from nearby apartment blocks where former JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army) officers lived, the minaret of the Ferhadija Mosque was mined and demolished.¹⁹

The destruction of the Ferhadija in two stages allowed Banja Luka’s citizens to brave the heavy police presence on the mornings of 7 and 8 May to stare at its ruins, many – not only Muslims – in a state of shock and disbelief.²⁰ Indeed, politician (and later convicted war criminal) Radoslav Brđanin clearly felt too many Serbs were protesting about the demolition of the mosque, commenting in the Assembly of Republika Srpska on 9 May:

I propose to ban the Satanization of Se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Note on Terminology
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 Destruction of the Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Overview
• 2 Documenting the Destruction
• 3 Topography of Destruction: Post-conflict Fieldwork Assessing the Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 4 Cultural Heritage Protection in Post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina: Annex 8 of the Dayton Peace Agreement
• 5 Domains of Restoration: Actors and Agendas in Post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 6 The Built Heritage in the Post-War Reconstruction of Stolac
• 7 Restoring War-Damaged Built Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina: An International Perspective
• 8 Cultural Heritage, the Search for Justice and Human Rights
• Appendix: A Brief Introduction to the Cultural Heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Glossary
• Acknowledgement
• Illustration Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index