The 1992-1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, ...and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces.
InBlue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys.
Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja,Blue Helmets and Black Marketsis a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.
Sarajevo Under Siegeoffers a richly detailed account of the lived experiences of ordinary people in this multicultural city between 1992 and 1996, during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Moving ...beyond the shelling, snipers, and shortages, it documents the coping strategies people adopted and the creativity with which they responded to desperate circumstances.
Ivana Maček, an anthropologist who grew up in the former Yugoslavia, argues that the division of Bosnians into antagonistic ethnonational groups was the result rather than the cause of the war, a view that was not only generally assumed by Americans and Western Europeans but also deliberately promoted by Serb, Croat, and Muslim nationalist politicians. Nationalist political leaders appealed to ethnoreligious loyalties and sowed mistrust between people who had previously coexisted peacefully in Sarajevo. Normality dissolved and relationships were reconstructed as individuals tried to ascertain who could be trusted.
Over time, this ethnography shows, Sarajevans shifted from the shock they felt as civilians in a city under siege into a "soldier" way of thinking, siding with one group and blaming others for the war. Eventually, they became disillusioned with these simple rationales for suffering and adopted a "deserter" stance, trying to take moral responsibility for their own choices in spite of their powerless position. The coexistence of these contradictory views reflects the confusion Sarajevans felt in the midst of a chaotic war.
Maček respects the subjectivity of her informants and gives Sarajevans' own words a dignity that is not always accorded the viewpoints of ordinary citizens. Combining scholarship on political violence with firsthand observation and telling insights, this book is of vital importance to people who seek to understand the dynamics of armed conflict along ethnonational lines both within and beyond Europe.
Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More ...than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless "Meantime." Ethnographically investigating yearnings for "normal lives" in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.
On April 15, 1941, Sarajevo fell to Germany's 16th Motorized Infantry Division. The city, along with the rest of Bosnia, was incorporated into the Independent State of Croatia, one of the most brutal ...of Nazi satellite states run by the ultranationalist Croat Ustasha regime. The occupation posed an extraordinary set of challenges to Sarajevo's famously cosmopolitan culture and its civic consciousness; these challenges included humanitarian and political crises and tensions of national identity. As detailed for the first time in Emily Greble's book, the city's complex mosaic of confessions (Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish) and ethnicities (Croat, Serb, Jew, Bosnian Muslim, Roma, and various other national minorities) began to fracture under the Ustasha regime's violent assault on "Serbs, Jews, and Roma"-contested categories of identity in this multiconfessional space-tearing at the city's most basic traditions. Nor was there unanimity within the various ethnic and confessional groups: some Catholic Croats detested the Ustasha regime while others rode to power within it; Muslims quarreled about how best to position themselves for the postwar world, and some cast their lot with Hitler and joined the ill-fated Muslim Waffen SS. In time, these centripetal forces were complicated by the Yugoslav civil war, a multisided civil conflict fought among Communist Partisans, Chetniks (Serb nationalists), Ustashas, and a host of other smaller groups. The absence of military conflict in Sarajevo allows Greble to explore the different sides of civil conflict, shedding light on the ways that humanitarian crises contributed to civil tensions and the ways that marginalized groups sought political power within the shifting political system. There is much drama in these pages: In the late days of the war, the Ustasha leaders, realizing that their game was up, turned the city into a slaughterhouse before fleeing abroad. The arrival of the Communist Partisans in April 1945 ushered in a new revolutionary era, one met with caution by the townspeople. Greble tells this complex story with remarkable clarity. Throughout, she emphasizes the measures that the city's leaders took to preserve against staggering odds the cultural and religious pluralism that had long enabled the city's diverse populations to thrive together.
How is it possible that despite the destruction of its infrastructure during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, Bosnian cinema rapidly rose to claim many of the most prestigious awards in world ...cinema during the 2000s? Were Bosnian films simply 'better' than those from neighbouring post-Yugoslav countries? Perhaps not. This work proposes that the international success of Bosnian films since the turn of the millennium has been due to how they enact Western prejudices concerning the war and its consequences. Delivering films with national narratives which associate the country with primitiveness and victimhood, Western audiences have engaged in dark tourism of the Bosnian screen.
This paper presents the scientific and academic work of Muhamed Dželilović, professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and Information Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy, University of ...Sarajevo. There is a special focus on two of Dželilović's books, Slaveni o Danteu and Kalhasovo proročanstvo, which claimed to establish the framework for all Dželilović's other scientific and academic work. Dželilović's approach to literature implies a complex dialogue with the greatest writers of the world's cultural tradition. At the same time, the most important domestic authors also find their place in that wider context.
In the early 1960s, when Bosnia and Herzegovina was renamed to Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo experienced an exponential growth and an economic and demographic boom that ...exceeded the availability of housing. To remedy this growth peripheral areas were occupied by newly built districts - “residential colonies”, which among other things reflected the gigantism of the socialist period, and proposed a system made up of blocks and super-blocks scattered in open territories. The architectural panorama was enriched by a series of new architectural editions, expressly inspired by the principles of functionalism and rationalism of the Bauhaus. All this has been created on the foundations made by a group of architects who returned to Sarajevo, and in Bosnia Herzegovina in general, after they had been trained in the most important European schools of architecture. Work of the new generations of Yugoslav architects marked a shift at the architectural scene in the 1960s who experimented with the “modernist” interpretations of authentic local architectural expression. The paper intends to retrace some of the main stages of “modernization” of Sarajevo and highlight the singularity of architectural production that is, internationally, still unknown.
Through the lens of the identification of the pre-war Sarajevo with the Foucauldian heterotopia, the paper traces the eighteenth-century birth of the ambiguously revolutionary idea of nation and its ...overlap with that of the territorial-national-state, focusing on the roots of ethnonationalism with its related
construction of the enemy, in the wake of Carl Schmitt, as a fundamental and consubstantial category of the "political". After questioning how liberal democracies are not exempt, but rather rely on these dynamics, the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina is then traced. In the light of it, the theses of multiculturalism
promoted by Will Kymlicka and Joseph Raz, and that of constitutional patriotism outlined by Jürgen Habermas are finally reread. These attempts to overcome the conflicts arising between the so-called ethnic, or cultural, or national differences, are examined with respect to the fundamental question of how such differences are constructed and used.
The paper presents three literary images of the coexistence of Jews and Muslims in Ottoman Bosnia. The pictures chronologically represent a hodogram of coexistence from the 16th to the beginning of ...the 20th century. The first picture is Sušić's short story Šta učini Don Daniel Rodriga, in which the author first shows the early relationship between Bosnian Muslims and Jews in trade between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic, and then the social controversies that accompanied that process. The second picture is based on Bašeski's Ljetopis and presents a picture of coexistence in the daily life of Sarajevo in the 18th century, where it does not only include the beautiful and positive, but also the negative representations. However, this picture shows the dynamic connections between Muslims and Jews at the national level, but also the differences and tensions conditioned by the social, religious, and political context. The third picture represents the positive relationship between Muslims and Jews in the example of literary representations of Sarajevo’s Purim. Here we analyze the different interpretations of this event, as well as how much they, regardless of evident contradictions, together influenced the shaping of the discourse about this holiday of Sarajevo’s Jews.
•Multispectral imaging for study of the Sarajevo Haggadah.•Non-invasive scientific analysis of medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts.•Application of image processing techniques to recover erased ...text.
Over the last two decades, multispectral imaging (MSI) has established itself as the most important tool in recovering illegible text in erased or damaged manuscripts, and to a lesser extent as an aid to the codicological study of manuscript supports and media. Rarely, however, have spectral imaging initiatives involved Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. In 2022, an international team of scholars, imaging scientists, and conservators from the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester imaged the Sarajevo Haggadah multispectrally. Produced for a Jewish commissioner and housed at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this 14th-century illuminated manuscript contains, inter alia, a partially erased text of a sale contract on folio 106v* that is now newly legible. Codicological details of the manuscript – ink, stains, type of animal used for parchment – have also benefitted from material analysis via MSI.
Herein, we describe the MSI process of the Sarajevo Haggadah and the application of image processing algorithms to recover the erased text on folio 106v*. A complete text of a sale contract is revealed for the first time, providing significant information about the ownership and provenance of the Sarajevo Haggadah at the beginning of the 16th century.
