"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [12]

Chapter 10: A Loser's Peace
With the international reaction to two well-publicized incidents where large numbers of civilians were killed by mortar fire came the beginning of the end of the war in Sarajevo. Under extreme pressure, even from their Russian allies, the Serb nationalist army finally agreed to pull back their heavy weapons and essentially end the siege in exchange for promises that the Bosnian army would not counter-attack.

But while the shooting, shelling, and killing were over, it would be very wrong to say that life was "returning to normal." What had been normal in prewar Sarajevo was gone. The city, like Oslobodjenje, had survived, but the cost had been high. Many residents had trouble adjusting to postwar life, including the radical reworking of social relations. The rise of the military as an important institution, the replacement of many former residents by conservative rural refugees, and the increasing power of Muslim nationalism and the SDA all contributed to a new social order in which angry teenage gangs roamed the streets and Serbs who had remained loyal to the Bosnian state found themselves being ostracized simply for not being Muslim.

Oslobodjenje continued publication, now increasingly as an opponent of the government rather than a supporter. Ethnic cleansing continued in Serb-held parts of Bosnia. Ethnic separation would not go away once the war ended. Sarajevo, and Oslobodjenje, survived, but the values both had embodied were not so certain to return.

*************

This is the end of the book. There is no epilogue or conclusion, and since the book was published in 1995 it ends before the war--and the final orgy of genocide in eastern Bosnia--did. I regret that this review took so long--the book is actually a brisk and enjoyable read; it's only my own distraction with graduate school and family life which has dragged this out so far. I highly recommend this book to people interested in either life in Sarajevo during the war, or the role of a free press in wartime or when democracy and secular freedom are under attack.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [11]

Chapter 9: The Wounded City
By 1993, the more than the physical infrastructure of Sarajevo was damaged. The fragile, multicultural unity of the city was also deeply wounded. For that matter, so was the will and the morale of thousands of Sarajevo residents, including the staff of Oslobodjenje. The continuation of the war and the validation of ethnic division by the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan had the effect of strengthening Muslim nationalism, which could   only further undermine what remained of Sarajevo's prewar cosmopolitanism.

Izetbegovic refused to support the plan but felt that he needed to present it; because it was for a Muslim state he called a special Muslim-only assembly to vote on the measure before it was passed on to the National Assembly. The forces of Muslim nationalism seemed to be on the rise; Mustafa Ceric became outspokenly so. In the meantime, the staff of the paper kept a low profile and focused on the goal of surviving to the newspapers' 50th anniversary.

Ultimately, the measure was defeated--even among the Muslim majority, believers in inclusive secularism still held the upper hand. Oslobodjenje managed to publish a special 50th anniversary edition. And while the staff bickered more and more, and disagreements increased in frequency, they never broke down along ethnic lines. A new government formed in the wake of the defeat of Muslim nationalism, and it quickly cracked down on the gangsters who used their position in the military to exploit the population, leading to an outpouring of public support and overt expressions of approval from the paper.

But while these were welcome developments, things were not good. The paper still struggled. Kurspahic moved himself and his family to New York City to raise funds for the paper, leaving some staff angry and an overwhelmed Gordana Knezevic in charge. Electricity became harder and harder to come by. A promised Sarajevo film festival was completely undermined by United Nations refusal to cooperate and Serb shelling. Residents found themselves wearying of the everyday struggle to meet basic needs while avoiding death.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [7]

Chapter 5: Hatred

Hatred of the other has to be learned. And even once learned, it needs constant reinforcement. Hatred is a powerful motivating tool if you are willing to accept the consequences, or remain blind to them.

The leadership of the Bosnian Serb separatists desperately needed the outside world to believe that Bosnia was a land riven with ancient, immutable hatreds. To believe so made the war seem inevitable and beyond the scope of international concern. It also legitimized ethnic partition. Many in the international community were willing to oblige; none more enthusiastically than Lewis MacKenzie, who mocked any possibility of a peaceful solution and seems to have arrived in Bosnia with his mind already made up. It is worth noting that Gjelten makes note of the fact that MacKenzie was offered financial compensation by the American advocacy group SerbNet to give two speeches propagating such views to the American public. This book was published in 1995. The only people who ever took MacKenzie at his word on Bosnia in the years since he was there were people who were clearly not paying attention.

The Bosnian government, and the Muslim plurality, just as desperately needed the world to believe that there was a long tradition of coexistence and tolerance in Bosnia. Not a strife-free, utopian paradise like MacKenzie so contemptuously accused those who differed with his "they all hate each other" condemnations, but a land of long-standing intermixing and cultural sharing. It was an argument grounded in both history, and demographic facts--particularly in Sarajevo. It was a compelling argument, and an inspiring one. It should have carried more weight with the Western democracies. But the Bosnian Serbs had tanks, and heavy artillery, and an overwhelming military advantage. If they couldn't find hatred already existing, they would will it into existence with propaganda and violence.

Because they didn't just need to convince the outside world. They needed to convince the people of Bosnia, Serbs and non-Serbs alike. It wasn't enough to win territory; the Muslims needed to leave and never come back. The culture of this new Bosnia--a Bosnia devoid of that special ethnic and religious mix which made the country what it was--needed to be cleansed just as thoroughly as the demographic map needed to be. Mosques needed to be dynamited and bulldozed from memory. Orthodox priests needed to sanctify racial violence and ethnic segregation. Bosnia's Nobel-Prize winning author Ivo Andric needed to be remembered for the violence he wrote about, but not the historical continuities which framed that violence. Remember the hatreds he described, but forget that the Bridge over the Drina was, indeed, a bridge that connected people to each other.

Keep teaching that hatred, because otherwise ordinary Serbs might forget it and make the unforgivable error of thinking that they can trust their neighbors and stand by their fellow Bosnians. Oslobodjenje was targeting because it was a symbol of the cosmopolitan tolerance which Sarajevo represented; both needed to be destroyed. The Serbs who stayed in Sarajevo, the Serb reporters who continued writing for its beloved newspaper, were obviously failed Serbs. How could they be otherwise? They had failed to learn to hate.

Perhaps the Bosnian Serb leadership got to them too late. That mistake was not repeated with at least one 12 year-old Serb boy in the newly-cleansed town of Hadzici. Echoing the same sentiments of thousands of Bosnian Serbs who had learned how to hate, he told a reporter "I do not miss my Muslim classmates one bit. It has been explained to me that while we were playing together, they were actually plotting behind my back."

Gjelten lets that boy have the last word in this chapter on "Hatred." And so shall I.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [4]

Chapter 2: A Time of Change

This chapter explains the changes at Oslobodjenje as it morphed from a party-line Communist party mouthpiece to a genuine, independent news organization which was the most respected paper in Yugoslavia (according to a poll of fellow journalists), and the third-most popular in the country as well. When the war broke out in Sarajevo in April of 1992, the paper had not only broken free of party control, it had also set itself up as independent of all three nationalist parties in the republic when elections were held.

Much of the background in this chapter is familiar, but interwoven in the context of the decline of Communism, the development of nationalist politics in the republics, the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, the increasing radicalization of Serbia and ethnic Serbs, and the outbreak of hostilities in Croatia we are also introduced to head editor Kemal Kurspahic, assistant editor Ljiljana Smajlovic, and reporter Vlado Mrkic. Kurspahic, a secular Muslim, had risen up to the top of the paper, and had led the move away from being a party organ to a professional, objective newspaper modeled on the American papers he had encountered while stationed in New York. Mrkic, an ethnic Serb, is a reporter's reporter--he abandoned a presumably more prestigious or lucrative job as editor because it didn't suit him and had returned to doing what he did best--going out after a story on his own.

Smajlovic, who like the other two was a product of the old system but relished the opportunity to do "real journalism" once it became possible, ultimately chose to leave Sarajevo when she found she couldn't be fully objective; while she didn't support the nationalist program, she found that she also could not stomach the idea of leading a struggle against "her" people--the Bosnian Serbs. Her parents had been devout Communists, but her mother turned around and embraced the Serb nationalist program. Ljiljana couldn't go that far; but she also couldn't bear to stay at Oslobodjenje. The moment of truth came in Croatia, when she was investigating Croat reports that Serbs had burned a local village. She was sure that the story was propaganda. When she discovered that the story was true, she found that she simply couldn't report the truth. Caught between her genuine disdain for ethnic violence and her new found ethnic loyalties, she left. Surely, many other Serbs who fled Sarajevo, or otherwise  implicitly sided with "their" people experienced a similar dynamic.

The chapter ends with Ljiljana explaining that she realized that she was in the war, not outside of it; this statement parallels Gjelten's own observations earlier in the chapter that people in Sarajevo felt that the turmoil in Kosovo and the war in Croatia didn't really concern them directly. Just as Ljiljana discovered that nationalism could shatter her sense of remove, so would  the people of Sarajevo learn that their proud heritage of cosmopolitan tolerance was vulnerable.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [2]

Introduction: A War Over Names

The introduction briefly summarizes events in Sarajevo from the breakout of hostilities in April, 1992, to the 1994 post-'Breadline Massacre' ceasefire. Gjelten also briefly explains how he came to know the staff of Oslobodjenje--unable to find the rear entrance to the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo (the front, of course, was under sniper fire) on his first of many visits to Sarajevo, he instead showed up at the apartment of two people he'd been referred to: Ivo and Gordana Knezevic. Ivo is Croat and a professor; Gordana is a Serb and an assistant editor at the popular and respected daily newspaper, which had begun in 1943 as an underground publication of Tito's Partisans. Gjelten stayed with them for eight days his first visit, and on every one of his many return trips he always visited them and their youngest son (the other children had left Sarajevo before it was completely closed).

Gjelten's sketch of the situation in Sarajevo during this period is short. In general, he explains the uniquely multicultural and tolerant nature of pre-war Sarajevo, and how the idea of civic nationalism it represented was a threat to the ethnic nationalism being espoused by the likes of Karadzic and Tudjman. This idea was appealing to many Western observers and supporters, including himself, but the ideal seemed quite tarnished two years later when the city had been changed by two years of struggle, terror, violence, and ethnic tensions. The demographic makeup had become more overwhelmingly Muslim as many non-Muslims had left, many other less cosmopolitan Muslims from the countryside had arrived, and the SDA-led government had become more shrilly "Muslim" in nationalistic identity and even in confessional terms. The city seemed much less democratic and cosmopolitan than many of its admirers had believed it to be.

Gjelten notes that even as these unfortunate changes were becoming apparent, some media observers began to question the dominant narrative about the war, wondering if the majority of Western media coverage had been biased. As Gjelten puts it, "perhaps it was time for those of us who had described the Sarajevo struggle in moral terms to rethink our sympathies."

The Diana Johnstones of the world might feel a little thrill at reading that sentence, but the very next paragraph would quickly disabuse any Bosnian revisionist of the hope that they have another ally. Gjelten insists that in order to understand how the fiercely anti-nationalist Sarajevo he quickly came to admire and care about in 1992 became the predominantly Muslim, somewhat bitter and hostile, and vaguely anti-democratic city of 1994, it is necessary to take a close look at what the experience of ethnic war, nationalist agitation, and the hardships of living in a city under siege. A lot happened to the people of Sarajevo during those two years, and his book uses the experience of the city's heroic daily newspaper, with its proud tradition of democratic and anti-nationalist beliefs, in coping with the stresses of that period as a window to understand what happened to Sarajevo in general.

In the next post, I will begin Chapter One.

"Sarajevo Daily" "by Tom Gjelten [1]

[As is becoming an all-too predictable routine, this blog goes more or less dormant during the Spring and Fall semesters and then I try to get a review or two in during the Winter and Summer breaks. In keeping with this de facto tradition, here is my latest review.]

Tom Gjelten has been a correspondent for National Public Radio since 1982. In 1995, he published a book based on his reporting from Sarajevo entitled Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege. Gjelten chose to present the story of the Sarajevo daily newspaper Oslobodenje as a microcosm of the multiethnic city under nationalist attack. Gjelten's account has been widely praised, and although he is not a Serbo-Croat speaker, many of the principles he worked with were fluent English speakers, and he also had access to translators when interviewing others.

I will begin my review in the next post.