2 Premises, setting and design of the research
2.2 War and Sarajevo
Armed conflict in the early 1990s unleashed over Sarajevo in the scheme of a siege, severing its contacts with the outside world and turning the city into a bounded,
19 Yin, “Case Study Research”; Flyvbjerg, “Case Study”; Ragin, Charles C., and Howard S. Becker, eds. What
confined and enclosed space for four years. Between 1992 and 1995, contingents of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Bosnian Serb forces of the newly proclaimed Republika Srpska20 encircled Sarajevo precluding movement and communications through a blockade that isolated the city almost completely, disrupting water and power supplies, and reducing the availability of food to the uncertain and intermittent distribution of humanitarian aid. From positions on the surroundings of the city, mortars and snipers targeted the population daily with no discernible criteria, disrupting all features of everyday life and reducing it to a struggle for survival, while conducting a campaign of terror on people of all ages.21
As throughout BiH the war unfolded in patterns aimed at “cleansing” and partitioning the country, framed on revisited “ethnic” identities and the demarcation of their distinct and incommensurable “cultures”, the siege of Sarajevo clearly became a direct attack against the city's mixed character, its pluralistic identity and its existence and life habits as evidence of a (cultural) history of entanglements and hybridity:
"[a] prime aim of the 1992-95 war was to purge the persons, artifacts, and records that attest to the region's crazy-quilt pattern of religions and ethnicities and to erase the biological and cultural results of their mergers. [...] In besieged Sarajevo, armed aggressors bombed centuries-old cultural landmarks and
20 The JNA responded to the government of Yugoslavia when the conflict broke out in BiH. Although it gradually turned into a pro-Serb forces, at the conflict's outset it still contained some non-Serb officers and moderate Serb officers, and supposedly acted to restore Yugoslav unity as a communist institution (see Woodward, Balkan Tragedy). In April 1992 the federal government ordered the JNA to withdraw from BiH, but many JNA soldiers and most of its heavy weapons remained on the territory and gathered into the army of Republika Srpska (Vojska Republike Srpske,VRS). On the ethnic background of forces besieging Sarajevo, King remarks that "to imply that all of the irregulars in support of the Bosnian Serbs at Sarajevo were Bosnian Serbs under Karadzic's control is an oversimplification. While most of the irregulars were probably Bosnian Serbs, some were Serbians, Montenegrins, and even Croatian Serbs who were fighting for the overall cause of Serb nationalism", King, Curtis S, “The Siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1995,” in Block by Block: The
Challenges of Urban Operations, edited by William G. Robertson and Lawrence A. Yates (Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas: U.S. Army Command And General Staff College Press, 2003), 250.
21 See ICTY cases against Stanislav Galic (IT-98-29) and Dragomir Milosevic (IT-98-29/1), commanders of the Sarajevo Romanija Corps of VRS, sentenced respectively to life imprisonment in 2006 and to 29 years' imprisonment in 2009 for (among other crimes) conducing “a campaign of sniping and shelling attacks on the city of Sarajevo [...] with the primary aim of spreading terror among the city's civilian population” (www.icty.org).
incinerated one-of-a-kind manuscripts in their attempt to blot out the city's vibrant history of diversity and overlaps".22
This attack was not only aimed at military or strategic targets, nor directly at the conquest of the capital, but rather showed that in the frame of warfare in BiH, (the siege of) Sarajevo had acquired pivotal importance for its symbolic and political value and bearings. In his analysis of urban operations during the siege of Sarajevo, King asserts that "Mladic [Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska in BiH] was clearly more concerned with destroying historic, cultural, and political targets than he was with striking at the enemy’s military forces".23
The destruction of Sarajevo's urban environment and the targeting of its inhabitants were thus neither “collateral damage” nor a purely military strategy, but were carried out as an assault in its own right:
"as the factions realized they were unable or unwilling to pay the price for the complete capture of the city, they also discovered that they could still use the battle for the city for political gain. This realization spawned a wide variety of tactical techniques that contributed little to capturing or relieving the capital but was designed to elicit political dividends".24
That this was the case was indicated also by the fact that "the shelling covered a wide variety of buildings – housing, public institutions, cultural monuments, utility buildings – and open spaces".25
Transforming the city into a confined space physically separated from the outside world by a fire line that ran all around it and prevented transit, the blockade redefined the urban spaces in terms of security and survival. While virtually every location in the city from which one could glimpse at the surrounding hillsides became a spot where his/her life was under threat of the snipers' fire,26 the significance and perception of streets, squares and neighbourhoods – of the built environment as well as open spaces – was radically overturned. While subverting the dwellers' perceptions of security and survival (indeed, of life and death), this attack also aimed at subverting
22 Markowitz, Sarajevo. A Bosnian Kaleidoscope,145. 23 King, “The Siege of Sarajevo,” 262.
24 Ibid., 235.
25 Coward, Urbicide, 22.
26 Macek, Ivana, Sarajevo under Siege. Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
the “everyday practices of Sarajevans' 'common life'",27 seeking to erase the built environment as “evidence of a successfully shared past”.28
“Common life” and “shared past” transposed onto the urban fabric of the capital in the fact that "before the siege, the distribution of the ethnic groups throughout Sarajevo was so mixed that almost no sector, except for the old city (Bascarsija), could claim a majority of one faction".29 As the literature on BiH and Yugoslavia amply reports, in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sarajevo, no single ethnic group comprised the absolute majority of the population before the war started. The “groups” were so distributed on the territory (and within the city) that no clear distinction could be traced to demarcate separate areas of settlement for each of them (which then heinously stood at the basis of the “cleansing” campaigns necessary to pursue partition). In Sarajevo, this entanglement was further testified by the fact that the city presented a high rate of so-called “mixed” marriages in Socialist Yugoslavia, taken to be “intermarriages” between members of different ethnic groups, whose offsprings would then be of “mixed” background.30 Similarly, the relatively high percentage of people declaring themselves “Jugoslaveni” (Yugoslav) in the pre-war census of 1991 or falling in its category of “Others” indicate that “ethnic” affiliation was not the only mode of identification adopted and that the cultural identity of the city was far more variegated than the reduction to a clash between three main groups usually suggests.31 These figures not only stand for the historical “co-presence” or “coexistence” of a variety of “groups” in the city of Sarajevo, but also more precisely reveal the interaction among such groups and the shared character of its urban spaces, and ultimately testify for the pluralism and hybridity of the city. The encirclement of Sarajevo with the siege and its confinement as a bounded space could only partially alter the city's heterogeneity and pluralism; indeed, it could not entirely homogenise the city's population, but rather served to
27 Markowitz, Sarajevo. A Bosnian Kaleidoscope, 29. 28 Coward, Urbicide, 25.
29 King, “The Siege of Sarajevo,” 246.
30 Hayden, “Imagined Communities and Real Victims”.
31 See census tables on the population of Yugoslavia between 1961 and 1991 in Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, 32-35; table of the population of Sarajevo by confession and by municipalities in Donia, Robert J., Sarajevo: A
Biography (University of Michigan Press, 2006), 266. See also Markowitz, Sarajevo. A Bosnian Kaleidoscope,
“Census and sensibilities”. Markowitz interprets the category of Jugoslaveni as "a flexible hybrid identity that represented neither an autochthonous category of belonging nor an ethnic group but a citizenship- based alternative to forcing a single choice among the nationalities" (p. 93), and presents research on Slovenes, Jews and Gypsies and their role as constitutive elements of the cultural identity of Sarajevo.
coerce it into defining identity along categories that the war itself was construing through violence:
"Sarajevans had to reconcile their own lived experiences as members of ethnocultural groups in a multicultural city with the mutually exclusive, even hostile constructions of ethnonational identity that political leaders formulated and the war increasingly forced upon them. Whatever position they chose, it was both existentially unstable and morally charged".32
The siege thus did not only inflict suffering, death and material destruction over a forcefully bounded space. It exerted coercion over established perceptions of identity at a collective level, trying to erase the city's pluralism and its inherent modes of definition of and relationship to difference. In this context, the total subversion of “normal life” and the lengthy exposure to violence had further, more profound repercussions:
"the experience of chaos that was characteristic of Sarajevans' struggle to recreate normality during the siege [...] was a typical limit situation, resembling the Holocaust and other instances of massive political violence. In limit situations the scale of destruction makes life conditions unrecognizable and incomprehensible: people feel powerless in the face of hostile forces; their survival or death is random; and the conditions of life are no longer morally recognizable as humane. […] This type of destruction surpasses anything that can easily be documented or communicated. While material destruction and mass killing can be caught on film or summarized in statistics, the destruction of cultural meanings is hard to express, as the very creation of meaning becomes difficult".33
Salient features of this recent experience of war seem meaningful premises to the study of memorialisation in that they infer that such experience had a double import and an ambivalent legacy, blending together material destruction and the disruption of “ways of life” in intricate ways.
At one level, the violent enclosure of the city in the siege constituted a unique experience: it left a unique memory of war that somehow adds to the city's identity, making it known as the place that endured the longest siege of the twentieth century. At the same time, through the annihilation of life and the urban built environment,
32 Macek, Sarajevo under Siege, 10. 33 Ibid., 35.
the siege also dismantled ways of making meaning of self and other, heterogeneity, hybridity, community, sharing and relationality.
These considerations thus highlight two fundamental aspects related to the endurance of the siege: while on the one hand this experience of war had a profound impact on the individual outline and identity of the city, on the other hand it disrupted broader conceptions and ways of constructing (cultural) meaning. This dualism seems embedded in a singular process of destruction whereby the encirclement of the urban space and its material destruction bear implications on ways of understanding identity and pluralism in more general and abstract terms.
When confronted with the construction of a memory of war against this particular background, thus, one lens is constituted by questions concerning memorialisation as a way of making sense of such experience in all its complexity, entailing this dualism.
The concept of urbicide offers one articulation of this connection and bridges the material and symbolic aspects of such destruction.
2.3 Urbicide
"The widespread destruction of urban fabric is the destruction of a common, shared space. Insofar as the dynamic of ethnic cleansing is that of the carving out of separate, ethnically homogeneous and self-determining territorial entities, it comprises a denial of common spaces through a destruction of that which attests to a record of sharing spaces - the heterogeneity of cultural heritage and the intermingling of civilian bodies".34
In his writing on urbicide, Coward argues for a radical reassessment of the implications of the destruction of the built environment as a form of political violence in its own right. To this aim, he advances the term urbicide to refer “both to the destruction of the built environment that comprises the fabric of the urban as well as to the destruction of the way of life specific to such material conditions".35
34 Coward, Martin, “Urbicide in Bosnia,” in Cities, War, and Terrorism. Towards an Urban Geopolitics, edited by Stephen Graham (Blackwell, 2004), 158, emphasis original.
The notion of urbicide provides further analytical tools to articulate more thoroughly reflections on the destruction of the built environment and expand on the implications entailed in this form of violence.
Firstly, it redirects the focus on some facets of the destruction of the built environment that are usually regarded as corollary to war, the eradication of rival groups/people(s), or the elimination of those elements in the landscape that symbolically represent the culture of the “Other”. This perspective helps elaborate on the destruction of those elements of the built environment that are not usually classified as pertaining to the cultural heritage, the buildings and spaces that are not bestowed with symbolic significance but still make part of the environment in which lives are lived, constituting the setting in which pluralism is enacted in common life. This observation is useful in the analysis of war in Sarajevo, as it draws attention to the fact that violence was not only directed against historic and cultural buildings as symbols of centuries-old pluralism, but rather entailed an attack against the built environment more generally, including the “mundane” buildings and the open spaces of the city.
Secondly, the theorisation of urbicide highlights the fact that analyses of conflict and of the destruction of the built environment are often based on an anthropocentric view that focuses crucially on people, downplaying other factors. In the framework of a conflict motivated through the delineation of distinct incommensurable cultural identities, the focus on buildings of symbolic significance is part of an interpretation that reads their destruction as an assault on the identity of the “other” group(s), by means of the annihilation of the material landmarks anchoring such identity to territory both to testify to the group's historical presence and enable its existence in the future.
Within this perspective, destruction of the built environment is thus mainly seen as contingent and instrumental to the violence perpetrated against people. While such readings are not incorrect, Coward remarks that "the violence against the architecture of Bosnia was disproportionate to the task of killing the people of Bosnia",36 and reemphasises that “the widespread destruction of urban fabric is the destruction of a common, shared space”.37
Along this view, built environment is not merely a frame or “background” to the lives of individuals and communities, but rather a constitutive element of the spatiality of existence. Within this reconceptualisation, Coward infers that “[p]lace [...] consists
36 Coward, “Urbicide in Bosnia,” 158. 37 Ibid., 158, emphasis original.
of the references a specific locus makes to other bodies/things”,38 and accordingly treats spatiality as a "network of relations constituted through a worldly engagement with (built) things".39 This understanding of spatiality posits buildings as points of reference from which “the world, as a series of significations and relations, unfolds".40 In this way, Coward conceptualises buildings as “complex relational network[s]”,41 and sees them as “locales”, or places that constitute the built environment as essentially public, contending that “the town is not a private map, but a public horizon that makes the locations of all the places within it [...] available to all".42 And since buildings are public and (at least in principle) available to all, the built environment also constitutes a space that is fundamentally shared and heterogeneous: “every relational network is predicated on nodes/buildings that, in being available to all, always offer the possibility that there will be an other that also constitutes their Being-in-the-world around the same object”.43
The core insight of this conceptualisation is its understanding of the built environment as “the material substrate that is the condition of possibility of plurality or heterogeneity",44 and the theorisation of urbicide as “the destruction of buildings not for what they individually represent (military target, cultural heritage, conceptual metaphor) but as that which is the condition of possibility of heterogeneous existence".45
This view balances the above mentioned anthropocentrism and complements it with a reassessment of the built environment as the context of human existence and action, reasserting that "sharing a common space [...] can only be achieved if a common, shared space exists".46 With the identification of alterity and relationality as features inherent to the built environment, urbicide is defined as "the destruction of the urban insofar as it is the arena in which an encounter with difference occurs".47
Destruction of the built environment is thus seen as a form of political violence per
se, complementing the violence perpetrated against people through the annihilation
38 Coward, Urbicide, 56. 39 Ibid., 70. 40 Ibid., 67. 41 Ibid., 68. 42 Ibid., 61. 43 Ibid., 124. 44 Ibid., 48. 45 Ibid., 39.
46 Coward, “Urbicide in Bosnia,” 158. 47 Ibid., 158.
of the milieu that enables life in common. Redirecting the focus on the built environment as such milieu, this perspective reinscribes “mundane” buildings in the analysis and contends that
"[t]o destroy a building is [...] to destroy that which comprises the condition of possibility of a community in the context of which individuated modes of existence are possible. This assault on community is one that is intended to reshape individual identity from one that exists in a state of plurality to one for whom homogeneity is the norm”.48
The deliberate targeting of the built environment during the conflict in BiH is accordingly read in this key as a violent practice through which "ethnic nationalist groups attempt[ed] to secure their identity through the destruction of the traces of alterity inherent to the locales constituted by buildings”.49
Sarajevo's experience of war in the recent past similarly elicits juxtaposition to the concept of urbicide. In this light, the shelling of the built environment was central in the siege because “buildings constitute the condition of possibility for [...] sharing precisely by holding open the possibility of others existing in the same spaces and places that they constitute”.50 The siege of Sarajevo thus represents an exertion of violence that “comprises a disavowal of heterogeneity, a covering-over of a fundamental existential plurality, by political subjectivities predicated on concepts of homogeneity and purity”.51 Recollecting Macek's definition of “limit situation”52 and her account of the “destruction of cultural meanings” entailed in the war to the definition and conceptualisation of urbicide, the siege parallels “an attempt to ungather the world".53
48 Coward, Urbicide, 12. 49 Ibid., 69.
50 Ibid., 91. 51 Ibid., 92.
52 Macek, Sarajevo under Siege, 35. 53 Coward, Urbicide, 69.