Svetlana Broz - Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War

The war in the former Yugoslavia is no longer in the headlines. The inside pages of U.S. newspapers carry scattered reports about economic crisis and ethnic tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, where the war raged during the 1990s. Paddy Ashdown, High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina that oversees the implementation of the civilian aspects of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, has said that he expects to be the last such representative as BH makes the transition to self-sustaining statehood. What can testimonies like those collected here possibly mean to us at this date, when Bosnia and Herzegovinas problems seem remote, endemic, or, at the very least, not ours?

There is a long answer to the question, which the reader will discover in reading this book, and a short answer, which is that we need, more than ever, to know the limits and possibilities of human ethics during the terror and tyranny of war and to understand the truth about the causes of war. This is particularly crucial in regard to what have been called the new wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: ethnic conflicts, as they are labeled, that appear to involve neighbor-to-neighbor violence. Some have argued that these wars are the product of ineradicable tribal hatreds. Others point to the cynical use of ethnicized or racialized politics by individual leaders, or to global structures of inequality that lead to competition and polarization. Bottom-up or top-down? Or simply a question of thuggery? How do we answer these questions? We can begin by listening to the people who lived through the war tell us what happened to them. Political history will record how the politicians, intellectuals, professionals, and the military created the war; this book documents what people tried to do about it when it came to their cities, towns, and villages.

Unspeakable Crimes

The people we hear in this book were faced with a world in which unspeakable crimes not only went unpunished but were rewarded with glory, profit, and power. In these conditions, they were starkly confronted with the limits and possibilities of their own choices. The testimonies recorded here document acts of seemingly random brutality as well as erratic acts of protection, self-sacrifice, and kindness. Some individuals abused others; many more did not.

In this book the historic events of the war are described from the point of view of the immediate, fragmented experiences of those drawn into it against their will as the state of Yugoslavia dissolved and political leaders jockeyed for power. Those leading these mass annihilations produced reasons to legitimize and promote them: the idea of democracy was abused in the service of fascism as it has been so often in the twentieth century (Broz observes that all nationalist parties have the word democratic in their titles), and self-defense played its usual part as the mask of aggression. Why did this resonate sufficiently in the hearts and minds of some citizens to drive them to mobilize and engage in forms of violence? Which citizens in fact committed acts of violence and under what conditions? Who resistedwhy, how? It is our responsibility to ask these questions. By the end of 2002, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had documented a total of 7,000 war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Given that the population of the territory at the beginning of the war was about 4.5 million, it is clear that popular participation in genocide was limited to a tiny proportion of the population.

Shock and Resistance

The testimonies describe ordinary people in Bosnia and Herzegovina who were surprised that the war could come to their towns, destroy their everyday lives, change their relationships with their neighbors, and ultimately change the course of their personal and collective history. It was a shock and they were unprepared. They remember the war as though it were a strange visitor: The war began for me on 18 September 1991; No one believed the war would come to Sarajevo; On the sixth of April 1992, a tank appeared in front of my building; We couldnt believe that the things happening everywhere else would start in Vare People quickly discovered the reality of the danger. These stories describe the real quandaries and complexity of life in war.

War made the common projects of integrated communities impossible: collective house building, routines of sharing coffee, workplace solidarities. It was a sudden and violent reconfiguration of social life. People struggled against this radical reinterpretation of the world that was played out by power politics on their identities, bodies, and homes. Ordinary people tried to thread through the war step by step, seizing where they could an opportunity to help neighbors or friends, and resisting the myth that ethnoreligious differences make them enemies. This resistance was sometimes as small as the offer of a cup of coffee to a stranger and at other times as great as self-sacrifice.