"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [15]

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BRIDGE

This short chapter eloquently makes a case not only for the legitimacy of Bosnian culture, but of its worth. Bosnia was a bridge, Sells argues; the Croat nationalists of "Herceg-Bosna" knew what they were doing when they destroyed the elegant Stari Most bridge in Moster. Ian Paisley, the thuggish Ulter Unionist leader, once contemptuously said (I am paraphrasing here) that "Bridges make traitors." If one is devoted to a diminished and sterile notion of culture and cultural identity--one in which the individual is defined primarily by membership to a group, and furthermore in which the group is defined by hard and fast distinctions versus the "other"--then this is true. Bridges lead to communication and exchanges, which then lead to intermingling and a loss of "purity." The desirability of "purity", then, must never be questioned.

The Wounding Sky

Bosnia has been defined for centuries by the mixture of different peoples and faiths; Orthodox, Catholic, and Bosnian before the Ottoman period, and then Orthodox, Catholic, Islam and then Judaism (both Sephardic and Ashkenazi) after. Sells describes the Bosnian tradition of the sevdalinka love lyrics, which were written in Cyrillac, Latin, and Adzamijski script. The complex mix of gender roles in the sevdalinka, in which a woman poses as a man singing to her male lover (and which were often actually performed by male singers) parallels the complex, multilayered development of this lyric tradition.

Sevdalinkas were composed in all the languages of the Empire--Persian, Turkish, Arabic, South Slavic--and were often translated from one to another. The precious manuscripts recording this unique aspect of Bosnia's heritage were destroyed when Serb gunners deliberately targeted the Oriental Institute.

Sells writes:

"Bosnia has a culture rich in transitions and translations. Those looking for the essence of culture and language in ethnic, racial, or religious purity will find Bosnia incomprehensible. On the other hand, those who see culture as a creative process that by its very nature involves intermingling and creative tension among different elements will treasure Bosnia-Herzegovina."

Unfortunately, many in the West failed to grasp this.

The Execution of Culture

"In the fall of 1995, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proclaimed that "there is no Bosnian culture." The context for Kissinger's claim was his proposal that Bosnia should be partitioned between Serbia and Croatia and the Muslims (and presumably anyone else who did not want to be part of ethnically pure Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia) should be placed in a "Muslim state." Partitioning Bosnia and putting the Muslims in a religious ghetto was the original goal of the Serb and Croat nationalists."

Other than again supporting the axiom that one can never go wrong disagreeing with America's most distinguished indicted war criminal, what can one say in response to such dismissive rubbish?

Sells dryly notes that the strongest refutation of Kissinger's statement came from Karadzic, Mladic, and the Serbian nationalists themselves, who put a great deal of energy and resources into destroying all traces of this allegedly non-existent culture. Also, there is this story:

"A Serb army officer entered the home of a Sarajevan artist, who happened to be Serb. Among the works of art, he saw a piece that depicted a page from the Qur'an. Infuriated, he had all the artwork taken out into the street, lined up, and shot to pieces with automatic weapons fire."

In order to justify the destruction of a people, you must first destroy their legitimacy. Sells recounts other episodes of genocide throughout modern history to illustrate the general truth of this observation. And then he concludes this section with a paragraph which manages to articulate something I have been grappling with for almost two years in this blog--the reason why Bosnia's fight should have been America's fight. One very big reason I believe American values were under attack in a small republic in southeast Europe in the first half of the last decade of the 20th Century. Allow me to quote the paragraph in its entirety:

"Like culture in the United States, Bosnian culture cannot be defined by the linguistic and religious criteria of nineteenth-century nationalism. Just as Americans share a language with the British and Australians, so Bosnians share a language with Serbs and Croats. Just as the United States has no single, official church, so Bosnia is made up of people of different religious confessions, and within those confessions, vastly different perspectives. If Bosnia has no culture, then the United States has no culture. If Bosnia should be partitioned into religiously pure apartheid states, then the same logic lead to the idea, proposed by the Christian Identity movement, that the United States should be divided into apartheid states of different races and religions."

Creation in the Fire

Sells recounts the art exhibition "Expo/Sarajevo 92" which was organized during the siege. He explains the great risks the artists had to take just to travel back and forth to the studio, and that the artists chose to make engravings because they are reproducible; a 'lucky' shell from Sarajevo's tormentors could destroy the display but not the works themselves. Those artists continued to create, to draw from Bosnia's rich, textured history and culture, and to celebrate life even while the world expected to nothing more than meekly survive and cower before those who wanted to carve the living body of Bosnia into neatly segmented, sterile, dead entities. The enemies of Bosnia, and the indifferent enablers of the West, wanted to believe that Bosnia would be defined by walls; those artists demonstrated yet again that it is rather defined by bridges.

A Dance

The book ends with this brief, almost poetic section. A Bosnian family--they are Serbs--living in North America throw a party for another Bosnian family who are moving to another city. The invite all the Bosnians they know--Serb, Croat, Bosniak. Everybody eats, drinks, talks, laughs. And then a sevdalinka is played. Dancing begins.

They are able to forget that they are Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. In this bittersweet reunion mixed with farewells far from home, they reconnect with their culture. Away from the burden of being of one ethnoreligious group, they are free to be Bosnians.

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That is how the book ends. I highly recommend it; at only slightly over 150 pages it is a quick and easy read. It raises important questions about the role faith will, can, or should play in a secular, cosmopolitan democracy in the 21st Century. I suspect we will be revisiting these and related questions in my blog and in many other forums in the near future.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [10]

CHAPTER FOUR: MASKS OF OTHERNESS

In the opening section, Sells draws parallels between the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995 and the outbreak of genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia a few years earlier. In broad terms, the two events were spawned by similar movements motivated by similar ideologies nursed in similar cultural/intellectual climates. The difference, Sells rightly notes, is that in the United States such extremist elements are, for the most part, highly marginalized, socially, culturally, and politically. In the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand, such elements had had access to--and even control of--mass media outlets; powerful backing in government and the military; and all too often the support of major religious institutions.

Creating the Perpetrator

Despite all that had been done to lay the groundwork for genocide, nationalists and their allies still needed to do more in order to unleash the monster of ethnic violence. Milosevic and his allies took many steps in the final months and years of Yugoslavia's existence to create the compliance and willingness needed in the general population.

The purge of the Serbian communist party, the betrayal of Ivan Stambolic, purges of the Yugoslav army in order to create a Serb-dominated (and nationalist-allied) force, and increasing support for and ties to paramilitary militias--these were some of the many steps taken at the Federal level in Belgrade.

At the grassroots level, the work of turning ordinary Serbs into soldiers for racial separation and hatred was carried out by more brutal and direct means. Sells documents a few incidents where ethnic Serbs were punished, imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed for refusing to commit acts of violence against their non-Serb neighbors, or for speaking out against the fascist violence. He also discusses the well-documented process by which Serb nationalists would try to provoke revenge killings by Muslims against Serbs in order to harden the divisions between the two groups.

Young soldiers were numbed to the violence they were ordered to commit by being plied constantly with booze. Muslim civilians were degraded by being held in concentration camps without adequate food, water, sanitation facilities or privacy. And, of course, the use of derogatory names such as "Turk" and "balije". The wide distribution of looted good tended to muzzle curiosity among Serbs about what was being done in their name since most people preferred not to think too deeply about where the looted goods in their homes came from. And the practice of opening concentration camps to local sadists with a grudge to settle spread the complicity in the killings throughout the community.

Militia leaders such as Arkan and Seselj weren't merely given extensive material and financial support; they were given control over civilian resources and markets as well, enabling them to muster support through patronage and access to staples and consumer goods.

Sells concludes this section by noting the ubiquity of masks and facepaint in the ranks of the Bosnian Serb army and its allied paramilitary squads--the masks:

"...transformed identities. Before he put it on, the militiaman was part of a multireligious community in which Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Slavic Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, and others had lived together. These were his friends, his work colleagues, his neighbors, his lovers, his spouse's family. Once he put on the mask, he was a Serb hero; those he was abusing were balije or Turks, race traitors and killers of the Christ-Prince Lazar."

The Forgotten Serbs

Sells rightly notes that the nationalists did not speak for all Serbs--as the frequency of their violence against 'bad Serbs' who wanted no part of the war of violence being waged against their neighbors bears out. He lists many examples of Serbs who--often at risk to themselves--showed kindness to their non-Serb neighbors, and took actions which saved lives. Bogdan Bogdanovic, the mayor of Belgrade, is one example.

Sells also notes that in 1995, most Bosnian Serbs did not live in Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia--not an insignificant number were still in the government controlled remainder of the country, and many more were in Serbia proper. Milosevic allowed the Bosnian Serb military and the militias access to refugee camps so that 'disloyal' Serbs could be rounded up--these were often sent to the front lines without proper military training as punishment.

Sells concludes with this example, which I must confess I was unfamiliar with:

"In Bosnian government areas, the Serb Civic Council was formed to work for a multireligious society and to articulate the concerns of those Serbs loyal to a multireligious Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Civic Council pointed out that the total number of Bosnian Serbs living under the control of the Republika Srpska was less than 50 percent; over 150,000 lived in Bosnian government-controlled areas and some 500,000 had fled abroad. The council criticized the international community for treating the religious nationalist faction as the sole representative of the Serbian people."

How outrageous and depressing it is to reflect that, despite having followed events in Bosnia with interest at the time, I had never once heard of the Serb Civic Council or of its alternate view of Serb ethnic citizenship in Bosnia. Then again--the Bosnian war would not be the last time Western observers would dismiss civil violence in an unstable society by pointing to violent, armed extremist groups as somehow representative of the larger social group they claimed to speak for. Think about that the next time a news anchor on TV describes what "the Shiites" or "the Sunnis" in Iraq want.

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I will conclude my review of Chapter four in my next post.