As I write this account sixteen years later, I realize that as outsiders we all receive the same first impression of war, usually through the media. We see a society collapse into a state of war, which empties out meanings and causes a vacuum of norms. War correspondents, shooting cameras instead of weapons, equipped with lenses of different calibers, their combat jackets stuffed with film instead of bullets, usually provide us with this information. The problem with Western media reports on events in the former Yugoslavia was that they rarely filled this vacuum with anything except politically empowered actors on the highest international institutional levels. News reports most often showed images of destroyed villages and homes, people on the run, and many other varieties of human misery, while the studio anchor would read the latest announcements about peace negotiations that were planned, a ceasefire that was broken, and the statements made by diplomats and heads of state. This strange juxtaposition left the viewer with a sense of incomprehensibility mixed with terror and empathy for the people hit by the war. After a year or two of such information, a sense of powerlessness, sometimes combined with rage, took over, as information combined with passivity led to indifference.
To my enormous relief, when I met the people I was looking for in Zagreb, I found that our relationships remained essentially intact. They dismissed out of hand my vaguely patriotic impulse to leave Sweden and be with my family and friends when times were hard. When I asked my best friend whether I should return, she said simply that it would do no good to anyone if I were in Zagreb. I could only go down into cellars when the air raid sirens sounded. It was much better that I was in Sweden, doing what I wanted to do with my life. A meeting with a colleague, who had outspoken pro-Croatian national feelings before the war, proved to me that people’s ideas were changing, but that this process was by no means a one-way road to nationalism. “You know,” she said, “I always thought that the immense emigration of Croats in this century was due to the Serbs pushing us out, but now I have realized that the Croats were leaving because other Croats would not let them live.” A year after this she moved to London with her husband and daughter.
As I was in Zagreb with a journalist, for a few days we went to the most obvious site of war: the front line. It was only about 30 kilometers south of Zagreb. The units watching the line were mostly composed of local residents, some of whom had been drafted, and others who had volunteered. After showing us the no-man’s-land and the positions of Serbian snipers on the other side, they invited us for pancakes in one of the deserted houses that functioned as their base. Inside the country kitchen, seated at one long table, eating and chatting with all these men of various ages and one girl, the atmosphere suddenly felt familiar—like being at scout camp, or coming to a mountain hut after a long day’s strenuous climbing in the Alps. I understood that, had I not been living in Sweden, I would be one of these people guarding the city’s last line of defense. It scared me, and for a moment I felt privileged to be just a visitor from abroad. Later on, after the war had started in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I realized that during that day the war had entered me. It was no longer happening somewhere else to somebody else. It was my war, and I was in it.
During the late spring of 1992, when war broke out in full in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I wrote about the situation in the former Yugoslavia and national identities, but as an anthropologist I studied Africa and such intriguing phenomena as witchcraft. That summer, refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina started arriving in Sweden in large numbers, and since I needed a summer job I began interpreting for the Swedish authorities. For three months, I worked full time at a refugee center, with the feeling of utter injustice constantly hovering over me. How could it be that these people, who had always been the least nationalistic of all Yugoslavs, had to suffer because of nationalist ideologies their leaders were promoting? Slovenes had always been Slovene patriots, Croats had a history of nationalistic movements, and Serbs took particular pride in their defense of the nation against both German fascists and Turks, but Bosnians? They were the most anti-nationalistic people of all. How could they be nationalists, when they lived good lives in a milieu composed of at least four major nationalities? They married and raised children in that mixed milieu; they made friends and had neighbors across ethnocultural lines. I was certain that there would be bloodshed if a war defined as a confrontation between different national groups ever started in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and because of that I thought it was impossible. But just that sort of war began, and unfortunately my worst fears materialized. For the whole summer I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to write about Bosnians and explain that they were not nationalists as the media had portrayed them, that Yugoslavia was not a boiling pot whose lid had suddenly been lifted, allowing people whose mutual hatreds had been suppressed to show their true nature. I had time only after my summer job was over, and I wrote. I realized that all my energies went into following, understanding, and explaining to others what was going on in the former Yugoslavia. I searched for a way to fuse my intellectual work and my personal engagement.
I decided to write a project proposal for a grant to do research on the processes through which national identities were being formed in Bosnia. I chose Bosnia, rather than my native Croatia, not only because it seemed most unjust that Bosnians were being hit hardest by a nationalistic war but also because I could not stand the idea of working with the aggressive Croatian nationalism of the early 1990s. This decision was painful, because it meant leaving the exciting world of African anthropology. But I had become entirely occupied by the challenge of understanding the situation of people in my former homeland. I say former homeland because by 1992 Yugoslavia had become my former homeland in a double sense: I had left it for Sweden, and while I was gone it had ceased to exist. I was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia, and when contemporary Croatia was formed I was already in Sweden. Croatia today is a strange state construction for me; it makes me feel more like a foreigner than its citizen, although the country and people still feel like home. Focusing on Bosnia, the least nationalistic of the former Yugoslav republics, seemed not only less personally fraught but also potentially more politically revealing.
This book is a result of my endeavors to make some sense out of the war in the former Yugoslavia, to put my world together again, so to speak, to make it somewhat more comprehensible, predictable, and safe again. In this sense, the story of the Sarajevan siege that I tell here has a wider meaning for anyone with experience of massive political violence or the drive to understand it. Students and researchers may find in these pages meaningful theoretical tools for framing war and a method for fieldwork during wartime. Diplomats and humanitarian workers may find it useful as a guide to the local knowledge that is crucially important for any constructive work in circumstances of war. People caught in the midst of war or recovering from its ravages may find that it eases the damage to know that others, in different times and different places, have shared their experiences.
The main difficulty with telling a story of such a massive destruction is that the social fabric, cultural habits, political ideas, moral beliefs, and even language are destroyed along with the physical environment. So much destruction creates a void in which nothing seems to remain. Nothingness has no form, so how can it be presented? We communicate through words and storytelling; we need language and forms to articulate our experiences and knowledge and make them available to others. In writing this book about the social consequences of war, I have utilized the same strategies that Sarajevans used to cope with its destructiveness. I found forms in Sarajevans’ everyday lives in a city under siege: in the artifacts, practices, ideas, and phrases they came up with while living amid utter devastation. The description of these creative processes and their results in all aspects of life, including the complicated story of national feelings and politics, gives form to the destruction of war, much as a photographic negative or a shadow image can make a form emerge before our eyes. My hope is that, although this is my story, it will be recognizable to Sarajevans who were there during the war.
In this book, I have not attempted to explain why or how the war occurred, the key questions that