I have employed two models to understand what happened during the siege of Sarajevo. One is based on Sarajevans’ concern with whether they were still “normal.” This question judged wartime existence by peacetime standards. It was almost always directed to those of us who came from the outside, for Sarajevans knew full well how profoundly their daily lives had been transformed by war. The other model is based on the seemingly contradictory moral stances that Sarajevans—like others in similar situations—adopted when it comes to destruction and the killing of human beings. In the existentially lethal and ethically sensitive circumstances that cannot be evaded in wartime, most of us respond by espousing a variety of positions, sometimes sequentially but often simultaneously, trying desperately to reconcile and justify our beliefs and practices despite grave instability and serious doubt. None of these positions proves entirely satisfying or tenable, but all of them are grounded in efforts not only to survive but to retain our common humanity.
PART I
Life Under Siege
Chapter 1
Civilian, Soldier, Deserter
How can people who have never experienced war understand what it is like to live in a city under siege in a state that has disintegrated into warring national armies? The terror aroused by the constant threat to life is intensified by the disruption of everyday existence that living in a war zone entails. Most of us have experienced a similar kind of shock on a smaller scale. Our first confrontation with the death of a person close to us, a disastrous accident with casualties whose faces we recognize, or a natural catastrophe in the place we call home—experiences of devastating loss seem incomprehensible and make us feel powerless. The world as we knew it has been destroyed. With no satisfactory way of dealing with this unprecedented existential situation, we question our previous faith in the orderliness of the world and the social norms that had governed our lives up to that point. This feeling of disorientation is not necessarily harmful in itself; indeed, it might even be necessary for the process of mourning that we must undergo to reorient ourselves to a new reality. War is like other experiences of devastating loss, but with two crucial differences: the losses are caused by fellow human beings, and we can never reorient ourselves completely to the new existential reality. Time after time, as the violence of war inflicts new losses, we are overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of the situation and our powerlessness within it. As Michael Taussig puts it, we find ourselves swinging wildly between “terror as usual” and shock (1992:17–18). When the agents of death and chaos are not impersonal forces but other people, former compatriots, and even neighbors, who suddenly bring destruction down upon us, the situation is even more profoundly unsettling. The faith in humanity on which society itself is founded is constantly undermined, and every action we take to try to save ourselves seems trivial or pointless.
In this light, some of the most shocking experiences of loss and disorientation in our peacetime lives in Europe and America resemble wartime experiences. Deaths caused by criminal gang violence in the inner cities and by terrorist attacks in New York City, London, and Madrid—as well as the “peacekeeping operations” that the United States, NATO, and the United Nations conduct in African countries and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—are all caused by people, yet they are incomprehensible and out of control. In these circumstances, we react in ways that are similar to those of people caught up in war. This resemblance makes the experiences of people in Sarajevo during the siege of much more profound interest to us than we would have expected.
Both the immediate experiences that being caught up in war entails and the moral dilemmas that arise when struggling to survive in a city under siege make untenable the notion that wars are rational, controlled, sometimes even honorable, ordered and limited by the laws of war, with legitimate aims and clearly distinct opposing sides—a notion that still dominates the practice of international politics.1 Almost without exception, whether conflict rages across international borders or attempts to impose new boundaries between peoples, war is gruesomely devoid of logic. Perhaps that is why fiction and film seem to capture wartime realities more powerfully than journalistic accounts and expert analyses. The moral unacceptability of “the laws of war” becomes appallingly clear when we examine the terminology designed to disguise the more ghastly rules of war: “collateral damage,” “low-intensity conflict,” and “ethnic cleansing” are among the euphemisms that obscure killing, starvation, and displacement. War legitimizes mass murder and destruction of property, which no other legal system allows on such a scale within such a short period of time.2
By trying to find the causes and logic of war—often in hope of understanding it and being able to control the damage it inflicts, if not stop or prevent it in future—we unavoidably fall into reifying the divisions into distinct warring sides, with their aims and justifications for mass violence. Such was the case with many expert analyses of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also with many Sarajevans in their attempts to orient themselves in chaotic life circumstances and to justify their often morally ambiguous practices. In order to avoid the pitfalls of oversimplifying war and ignoring its incomprehensible, unjustifiable, and unacceptable nature, I chose to let individuals’ lived experiences of violence stand at the center of research and from that point to trace the effects of war on society and culture.3 This account explores Sarajevans’ subjective responses to the death and destruction that engulfed their city and their repeated, though often futile, efforts to make sense of the disturbing and irrational situations in which they found themselves.
After struggling to orient myself in the midst of chaotic and contradictory experiences, I realized that these feelings and ideas could be sorted into three different modes of perceiving war. At first, people are so struck by the outbreak of a war they had thought impossible that the social norms they had thought secure collapse. I call this initial disbelief and the vacuum of meanings that follows the “civilian” mode of perceiving war. Then people attempt to order and explain the events and actors, adopting what I call the “soldier” mode. Aligning themselves with one or another of the warring sides, they seek protection and solidarity, giving some meaning to the risks they must face. The soldier mode offers a moral rationale for conflict, making the destruction and killing seem necessary and even acceptable. Finally, people realize through their own experiences of war that these explanations do not hold and shift to a third standpoint that I call the “deserter” mode.4 Abandoning the neat divisions between citizens and armies, friends and foes that mark the civilian and soldier modes, people give up allegiances to any opposing side and take responsibility for their own actions. This stance does not constitute treason or betrayal but expresses profound skepticism about the high ideals that justify vicious acts and an effort to recover some small measure of humanity in a world gone berserk.
These modes of feeling and thinking are not necessarily sequential or mutually exclusive; often people hold them simultaneously or shift back and forth between them as their situation changes. Everyone caught up in a war, or dealing with war as a journalist, diplomat, or researcher, employs all three of these perspectives. The inconsistencies in perceptions of war that are characteristic of those who are subjected to it involuntarily arise not only from war’s chaotic character but also from the best efforts to come to terms with it.
Imitation of Normal Life
As I focused on the experience of violence, I listened closely to what preoccupied my informants and how they spoke about everyday concerns. I noticed that people in Sarajevo often used the concept of normality to describe some situation, person, or way of life. The concept carried a moral charge, a positive sense of what