The capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina and an urban conglomeration with every important feature of a city, Sarajevo still felt like a town because of its social mixing and informality. It lies in a valley of the river Miljacka. Following the valley from its amphitheatric east to the plain in the west, the history of the city unfolds. Sarajevo was formed as a town around 1461, during Turkish times, and by 1660 it had become the largest city in the Balkans. All towns in the Ottoman Empire were structured by division into quarters, mahale (pl.), or distinct districts. Each mahala (sing.) belonged to a different religious congregation, with its characteristic place of worship. The larger religious groups had a larger number of mahale. Sarajevan mahale occupy the eastern, amphitheatric part of the city; the view shows a striking concentration of minarets and church towers. After the Hapsburg Empire annexed Bosnia in 1878, Austro-Hungarian architects began building to the west of the older Ottoman center. This phase of its growth makes downtown Sarajevo resemble any Central European city center from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. After World War II, expansion to the west continued. Yugoslav socialist architecture characterizes such buildings as the Parliament, the Holiday Inn, the UNIS twin skyscrapers (before the war popularly called “Momo” and “Uzeir” after Serb and Muslim characters in a humorous television series), the PTT (Post, Telegram, and Telephone) building, and the TV building. The modern suburbs of Grbavica, Hrasno, Čengić Vila, Alipašino polje, Neđarići, and Dobrinja grew here from 1960s on, as in other Yugoslavian and European cities. Different sorts of developments occurred on the slopes around the valley. In Velešići, Buča Potok, and Boljakov Potok, for example, villagers from Eastern Bosnia and Sandžak in Serbia moved in during the 1980s, giving the outskirts of the city a more rural look. In the west, where the valley merges with the plain, is the international airport—my point of entry into Sarajevo.
Map 1. Sarajevo under siege.
I had never been to Sarajevo before, and I had met only a few Sarajevans. I was familiar with the images of Bosnians that circulated in the former Yugoslavia. I had learned about Bosnian history and read Bosnian literature by such renowned novelists as Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović. I loved to sing Bosnian melancholic songs despite their patriarchal tone. I enormously enjoyed the popular prewar satirical program Top lista nadrealista (Top of the Surrealists) by a group of young Sarajevan men.12 I laughed at, and retold, jokes about Suljo, Mujo, and Fata, the stereotypical Muslim characters who figure in much of Bosnians’ self-deprecating humor.13
History and fiction taught me about the appalling brutality of the Ottoman occupiers toward the population. Boys were kidnapped to be trained as Ottoman soldiers, janjičari, a practice called danak u krvi, a tribute in blood. The history of Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the Inquisition and the European conquest of the rest of the world was no less bloody. Yet from the liberation of Sarajevo from the fascists by the partisans in 1945 until the dissolution of Yugoslavia, history was a horrific story firmly located in the past, bygone and never to return. When Franjo Tudjman, during his term as president of Croatia, said, “We live in historical times,” he was widely mocked not only for his pomposity but for his ignorance: while he was thinking of the heroic nature of Croatian nation-building, people were thinking of the misery that the nationalistic war had brought upon them. They would have been glad not to live in “historical times”!
The distinctive characteristic of Bosnians in general and Sarajevans in particular seems to have been—and still is—the shockingly lucid humor that flourished in the 1980s and continued throughout the war. No one who has seen it can forget a prewar sketch by the “Surrealists” in which Björn Borg comes as a refugee to Sarajevo because Sweden is at war with the penguins. Although no one recognizes him, people feel compassionate toward someone so far from home and try to help him the best they can. They find him a job in a coffee shop run by a Kosovo Albanian. His height, long blond hair, and incomprehensible speech make him look very stupid and out of place among the darker, shorter, and more alert Bosnians. At one point the kids in the street are playing tennis, and it turns out that Björn Borg is good at it. Everyone is happy for him and encourages him to keep it up! We all laughed at the absurdity of this upside-down situation, and no one could even dream that only a few years later forty thousand Bosnians would be seeking exile in Björn Borg’s native Sweden. In another prewar sketch, two stupid-looking street cleaners throw rubbish over a wall onto each other—a wall that was built in Sarajevo in order to separate the two warring sides and maintain the peace! At that moment, the Berlin Wall was falling and Europe was uniting. All these unimaginable reversals were true in the dream logic of night-mares—and soon became true in the “historical times” into which Sarajevans were unwillingly plunged.
The “Arrival Story”
Although war-torn Sarajevo was hardly a conventional anthropological field site, I could not help noticing certain resemblances—at least on the surface—to the fieldwork situation described in many a classical monograph (Pratt 1986). There was the “primitive other” whom we in the West did not understand, although in the case of Bosnia the “others” looked like us, were literate, and even spoke our languages. The colonial bureaucracy was present in the form of the UN. Life conditions were “primitive”: water was scarce and dirty, food was strange and difficult to get. Visitors were well advised to take their own provisions. There was no electricity. The utilities and comforts expected in a “civilized” place were lacking. The difference from the classical anthropological “bush” was that in Bosnia these conditions were situated within the remains of civilization, not outside of them. Bosnia had been part of Europe, but it seemed so no longer. Many westerners may have come to regard Bosnia as outside of Europe because they did not want to acknowledge that forces within their own societies and nation-states could lead to such a situation and were discomforted by the idea that they might be responsible for the city’s plight. Finally, there was the anthropologist as hero, entering the danger zone inhabited by “wild people” who were at war—a Hermes, to borrow Crapanzano’s metaphor (1986), a messenger between two worlds, the powerful, peaceful West and war-torn Sarajevo.
The road to Sarajevo, which started at the Croatian coast and then ran through territories under HVO and ABiH control, at the end passed through territory under the control of the Bosnian Serbs’ Army (Vojska Republike Srpske [VRS], Army of the Republika Srpska). In order for outsiders to reach Sarajevo by road, all three parties in the military conflict had to maintain a ceasefire. Whether formally negotiated or the result of stalemate and exhaustion, these intermissions in the fighting were unpredictable and highly unstable. The longest period that the UN-supervised routes called the “blue ways” were open was two or three months during the summer of 1994. Most often it was the Bosnian Serbs’ side that blocked land transports to Sarajevo. The ABiH and HVO were in conflict from late 1992 until early 1994, and during that time even the Bosnian Croats’ side blockaded the city. The Bosnian government’s side facilitated the passage of people and goods by using the tunnel under the airport, which was constructed because, even when the airport itself was under UN control, the UN denied passage to people seeking to enter and leave the city. Before the tunnel was dug, Sarajevans had to run across the runway hiding from the UN searchlights and the hail of bullets from Serbian snipers to reach the road into and out of Sarajevo. This tunnel was eight hundred meters long and it took thirty-five minutes to go through it, in a stooped position, with water up to one’s knees here and there. Only the energetic and determined could manage it, and even then they could not bring much baggage with them.
The airport was Sarajevo’s lifeline, but its capacity was very limited. In the autumn of 1994, there were military and diplomatic UN flights from Zagreb, humanitarian flights sponsored by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) that carried goods and personnel from Zagreb and Split, and flights that brought goods and journalists from Ancona, Italy. There were various types of UN identity cards, depending on the grounds for one’s accreditation. “Local personnel” included everyone who had a passport from one of the former Yugoslav republics. These cards conferred the same privileges as those held by “international personnel,” except