From a crossroads to a war

Sarajevo and Bosnia in general for a long time provided a model of tolerance and multiculturalism. This area formed a bridge between the Christian world and Islam, which has left important traces here. It also included a small Jewish minority, and was at the ridge between Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia.

This model survived a number of political experiences: the imperialism of the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, and the federal period of the “first” and the “second” Yugoslavias, one a monarchy and the other a socialist regime. Now and again tension arose between the different identities, but Bosnia and Sarajevo have always survived, preserving their wealth of alphabets, ethnic groups, and liturgies.

The war fought between 1992 and 1995 changed everything. It destroyed the country, pitting its people against each other, causing massacres and slaughters and the death of 100,000 people.

Sarajevo suffered more than any other through the anguish of this hell. Throughout the armed conflict Serbian forces besieged this city. Snipers opened fire on civilians and artillery destroyed homes, palaces, and monuments, with many still demolished. This was the case for the National Library, set on the banks of the Miljacka (the river that runs through this city), seriously damaged in August 1992. Almost all of the two million books and ancient manuscripts preserved there, Bosnia’s entire cultural heritage, went up in flames.

This library was not a strategic objective. Bombing it emphasized the intention, not just a Serbian prerogative, to destroy an entire culture and divide people who had always coexisted side by side. The library collapsed, as did Sarajevo.

Bosnia, three in one

Today’s Bosnia has incorporated this philosophy in its administrative organization. The Dayton Peace Agreements, signed in 1995, divided the country into two ethnic entities: the Republika Srpska and the Croatian-Muslim Federation, in turn divided into Croatian Cantons and Bosnian Cantons. Today’s Bosnia is a nation that is three in one, where the only winning model, as it is called there, is homogenization.

After 1995 Serbs, Muslims, and Croats have attempted to clear up and ethnically purify their respective territories, which faithfully follow the old front lines. Two years ago in Sarajevo, the then-president of Sarajevo’s Committee for Human Rights, Srdan Dizdarevic, explained to me that they had succeeded in preventing the return of refugees, an effort that, on the basis of the Daytona agreements, was meant to return to Bosnia its multiethnic lymph. “In the early post-war period,” Dizdarevic said, “the political élites kept refugees away with violence and intimidations. Now they use less violent but equally effective methods. The political parties, which filter every aspect of social life, prevent those not belonging to the ethnic group dominating a territory from finding jobs. So no one comes home, and those who do live under a regime of apartheid.”

A city driven by Islam

Sarajevo is now a completely Muslim city. Croatians have gone to live in their homeland or in cantons controlled by Croatian parties. The Serbs have settled in Srpska Sarajevo (a small appendix to the town), in Pale (Radovan Karadzic’s former stronghold), or in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srpska, and their numbers have fallen from 140,000 to 20,000. Their departure was replaced with the arrival of Bosnian refugees, fleeing the country’s Serbian and Croatian areas.

The new 100% Bosnian Sarajevo can be seen in the tidy lines of white Muslim graves on the hills that surround the capital where former combatants are laid to rest, also increasing the visual impact of the cult of the martyrs. It can also be seen in the new mosques and madrassas built in the city, in the loud calls of the muezzin, in the observance of the religious rules and the many women wearing the veil.

Changes made to the calendar for the Sarajevo Film Festival, the most important in the Balkans, are also significant, as the opening has been moved by a few days so as not to coincide with Ramadan. This gave rise to a number of perplexities, seeing that it results in a dichotomy, that between a cultural event addressed at overcoming ethnic divides in former Yugoslavia (during the Film Festival actors, directors, and spectators arrive from all corners of the Balkans) and what according to some observers is the progressive advancing of Islam. Sarajevo in fact is not at all the “Tehran of the Balkans” as described in propaganda by Serbs in Bosnia.

Let no man touch Tito

The new Sarajevo also takes it shape from the rewriting of local toponymy and history. The bridge named for Gavrilo Princip, the Serb irredentist who, in 1914, killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo sparking the beginning of World War I, has now changed name since it is considered a symbol of Serbian pride. It has now returned to its old name, the Latin Bridge (because it links the heart of the city to the old Catholic district). Another Serb from Sarajevo’s history, Vladimir “Valter” Peric, the brave partisan leader who in 1944 freed the city from the Nazis, has been relegated to oblivion.

Returning to toponymy, in 2004 the municipal authorities decided to name a street in honour of the father of the Bosnian nation, Alija Izetbegovic, the father of Bosnian independence and the symbol of resistance to the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. The choice fell on the Marsala Tita, a wide road that crosses the city centre, dedicated as the name indicates to Josip Broz Tito, founder and undisputed leader of Socialist Yugoslavia. But it never happened. Many citizens protested, stating that in spite of its limitations, the Yugoslav era should not be removed so brutally, because in the days of Tito, Sarajevo was after all a better city, an open and pluralistic city. A city that many inhabitants tried to save up to the bitter end, organizing marches for peace and unity. Among the most moving words spoken at the time were those of the great Bosnian poet of Muslim extraction, Abdulah Sidran. “Without the Serbs,” he said, “I could not breathe, without the Croatians I could not write, and without being myself I could not live with them.” But his appeal fell on deaf ears. The war came anyway and destroyed the Jerusalem of Europe.

Translated by Francesca Simmons