Cultural Genocide in Sarajevo and Those Who Resist it

[michael a sells]

In recent days I have posted articles on Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic
and Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic's systematic campaign to
annihilate all traces of Bosnian multicultural heritage by destroying
schools, music institutes, museums, libraries, manuscript collections,
bridges, churches, mosques, and graveyards.

For a glimpse into the world of those heroic people who risk their lives to
save what can be saved, I am posting the following article on efforts in
Sarajevo:

From a contribution by Andras R.

From: THE ART NEWSPAPER (LONDON), no. 32, November 1993:

EYE WITNESS IN SARAJEVO
OUR SISTER AND BROTHER CURATORS AND ART HISTORIANS: HOW DO ORDINARY PEOPLE
LIVE IN EXTRAORDINARY AND TERRIBLE TIMES?

SARAJEVO . . .

As an expert on Bosnian monuments, and secretary-general of the foundation
Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue, I arrived at Sarajevo airport in the
company of Roger C. Shrimplin, chairman of the Royal Institute of British
Architects Eastern European Committee. We were invited both by the Bosnian
government and by the Soros Foundation's Open Society Fund based in
Sarajevo, and together we formed the very first mission to Sarajevo
concerned with cultural heritage.

Life in Sarajevo -- and here I speak of the cultural and intellectural life
-- is a tribute to the continuation of peace. As Tony Land, of UNHCR
Sarajevo, said, "One kilometre from War is Peace. War is the abnormality
which we artificially sustain. Peace is normality".

Sarajevans meet daily, conversing intently and producing publications about
their culture, insofar as they can find paper on which to print. Cultural
organisations include two Institutes for the Protection of Monuments, one
town and one nation-wide (formerly, Federal); the Cultural Society of
Muslims (Preporod, meaning "renaissance"); the Cultural Society of
Catholics (Napredak, meaning "progress"); the Jewish Society
(Benevolencia), and the Women's Group (MAK "Bosanka"). Many members of
these organisations were formerly in the University.

Recent congresses they have held include ones on medicine in Bosnia, in
memory of a library of medical books which was destroyed, and one on an
analysis of their personal tragedy -- the cruel and massive destruction of
Bosnia's Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim monuments and books. At first, only
Muslim heritage was destroyed. Then reprisal destruction began and
eventually no class of monument was free from loss. As a brave counter-
gesture to this massive destruction, a project has been prepared by artists
and cultural workers of the city of Sarajevo and the Direction of the
Sarajevo Biennial of Contemporary Art, to found a Museum of Contemporary
Art in the former headquarters of the old Jugoslav National Army, to be
opened in the year 2000.

We all know that in this war, adherents to different religions have been
metamorphosed into "ethnic groups", which have then been led to attack each
other, or to be attacked. In Sarajevo's town government, however, and
cultural societies, those of different religions work together, as do those
of different religions in London and New York, and as did everyone in
Bosnia, before the start of this strange war.

Neither shells nor snipers (and snipers, it is said, are often Ukrainian
soldiers formerly working for the UN) regard ethnic differences in
selecting those whom they kill. Svetozar Pudaric, a Serbian architect with
the town's Institute for Protection of Monuments, and his Muslim
art-historian fiancee, both lost legs in a mortar blast. They married in
hospital; she has now given birth.

Among those still active in Sarajevo's surviving cultural core are Azra
Begic and Enver Imamovic, both of Muslim background and both accustomed to
their European-style lives. Both are art historians; Enver is an
archaeologist as well. Azra's concern is Bosnian-Herzegovinian
twentieth-century art; she is a museums advisor and vice-director of the
Art Gallery in Sarajevo; she has held administrative posts in the AICA, the
International Society of Art Critics. She is president of the Sarajevo
women's organisation MAK "Bosanka", and the author of many exhibition
catalogues and books on modern art.

Imamovic is Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University
of Sarajevo, and a traveller to remote archaeological sites in the Middle
and Far East. Azra Begic is in her fifties; Imamovic is younger, with
children that are still small.

Azra's forebears -- a Herzegovinian noble family called Radojevic in the
later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before they dopted Islam -- owned
Pocitelj on the River Neretva, south of Mostar. Pocitelj is a complex of
castellated medieval and early Islamic buildings which was destroyed by
Croats in mid-September. When Azra and her two sisters were small, after
the war and under communism, they were ordered through their school to
decide and declare whether they were Croats, Muslims or Serbs. Azra decided
she would be what there weren't too many of in the class, and became Serb.
Jasminka chose Croat. Abasa stuck to being Muslim because she wanted to
study law, and there were fewer Muslim girls wanting to be lawyers and so
more places were available to them. In fact, the forebears of the Begic
family, as West-Herzegovinian nobility, could have been either Croat or
Serb; their territory ran along the Catholic/Orthodox fault-line of change
in religion, that only distinguishing factor for what is now called
"ethnicity". They are not now practising Muslims.

Azra joined others, such as Enver Imamovic who, with the help of young
people, packed away movable art treasures and books from libraries and
museums, insofar as they were not already by then destroyed, and within the
mandate of the Commission for Saving the Cultural Heritage of Sarajevo,
founded 14 May 1992, under the direction of Mrs Mevlida Serdarevic. Azra
and Enver discovered then that some Serbian colleagues and sympathisers in
various institutions had already removed items of great value or interest
to their regime. Azra's art gallery lost icons in this way, and a collec-
tion of paintings by the Austrian-period painter Hodler, much admired in
Belgrade.

Both Azra and Enver participated in caring for the contents of the
Territorial Museum (Zemaljski Muzej), across "Sniper's Alley" from the
Holiday Inn. The atmosphere of the time, and the winter which followed it,
is presented in a letter from Enver to a friend in Zagreb: "Never before in
my life could I have imagined that this, what we are now going through in
such a terrible manner, could happen. How many times have I passed by when
a shell has fallen either in front of me, or behind my back, and killed a
few passers-by who happened to be there. They hit even in my immediate
vicinity; it is better if I don't tell you what happens and how it looks.
It suffices to tell you that the house I live in has so far twice remained
roofless, and that the flat above me has been devastated. The other day the
front wall of our house was hit, just at dusk, just as the entire day had
passed quietly, and there were ten children on sledges all around. I am
bearing all this relatively well, physically as well. My accumulated
fitness and everything I went through during my travels have made me tough
enough and I have no problems. On the contrary, I work enormously. At the
moment I am working on a large manuscript and at the same time I write
quite a lot for the newspapers, the radio, the TV, etc., because you can
fight as much and defend your country with the written word. We organise
scientific gatherings, round tables, because there is so much about
everything that is happening to us that you must explain to your own people
and to the world and to point out the roots of this evil.

"The situation at the Territorial Museum is desperate as well. Of all our
colleagues, only a few have remained; everybody else fled a long time ago.
The building itself has received some sixty mortar shots. By the way, a
foreign lady reporter at the Sarajevo hotel housing all the foreigners was
furious at the constant shelling of the hotel, got in her car, drove
herself to the Serbian headquarters and made a scene there. The brave
Serbian soldiers said they were so sorry, but that they were trying to hit
the museum! The hotel is across the street from it.

"I can be thanked for everything that we have succeeded in saving, not only
in the archaeological, but also in the other departments of the Museum,
because I rescued them under heaviest fire. Everything now stands ruined,
ajar; there are niether doors nor windows; snow, rain and humidity
entering. It is a real sorrow. One does as much as one can. In the same way
I look after my faculty at the University, because there is nobody who
dares to go there, because at several points you have to run because of
snipers who constantly keep these passages under fire. I am not afraid, and
so far everything has been OK. You cannot imagine how one becomes immune to
every- thing; the fear disappears and instead an anger and spite appears
within everybody. We thank our existence only to hope for better times,
because with this belief you can endure everything more easily, the cold as
much as the hunger and fear.

"I, too, could have left Sarajevo, but my conscience makes me remain here,
in our town and country, and to contribute as much as I can. It is
patriotism one suddenly feels strongly and it is much stronger than we
are."

When I met this heroic man, he wanted to conduct me across Sniper's Alley
to the museum. To my shame, I took a taxi from the Holiday Inn across the
street. However, I fled with him away from the museum, parallel to Sniper's
Alley, across threatened streets and past the blackened cadaver of the
University, while he told me of his rescue of Sarajevo's revered treasure,
the Sarajevo Haggadah, a thirteenth-fourteenth century manuscript brought
to Sarajevo by refugees from the Spanish Inquisition.

"That day 6 June was the most hellish ever in Sarajevo," Enver recalls.
"That was the day the barracks burned, the biggest barracks in town and
right near the museum, in the first war zone. All the fighting and
artillery attacks taking place then were at their height near the museum.
In these circumstances, our action took place. We entered the museum
unnoticed. For six hours we hunted for the Haggadah in all the places we
thought it might be. We forced open every museum safe and found it in none.
Finally, we came to the basement. It was completely dark. We had a little
torch, which lasted only two hours. We had to grope in the dark, and that
way we found it ...

"The basement itself was under water, which was rising fast because
projectiles had punctured the central heating pipes. The height of the
floor where the book lay was just a little higher than the height the water
had then reached. Had we found the Haggadah only a few hours later than we
did, water would already have reached it, and it would have been
destroyed."

True to his scholarly principles, Imamovic wrote his report about the
discovery of the Haggadah at its findspot, crouching on the floor for
safety, in water and in the dark.

Sarajevo is a European city, former host to the Olympic games. Sarajevans
are pained that they are not depicted as Europeans by the foreign press.
The Western press, they told us, likes to picture them in ethnic costumes,
or else dying or dead, like victims of gladiatorial combat, rather than as
the well- dressed Europeans, who can be seen engaged in a remarkable
variety of urban or cultural pursuits (as well as carrying their own water)
on any and all Sarajevan streets. The West refuses to allow them the
dignity of considering they need aid to culture as well as aid in the form
of food. They need the advice of foreign experts, such as emerge from
UNESCO to other lands in less terrible circumstances, to show them how to
safeguard their wounded monuments. This they do not get, because the West
has decided for them, monuments must come last.

Sarajevo's historic centre looks at first, or even second, glance, much as
before. Probably most buildings are damaged in some way, but most damage is
not total. Exteriors remain looking much as they did, even when the
interiors are burnt out. The Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish sacred buildings
look little affected by war. The much-photographed, fifteenth-century
Sheikh Magribija Mosque is the only seriously damaged mosque I saw in
central Sarajevo; most other major mosques have at least retained their
minarets. Jewish monuments look as before; even the ancient Jewish
cemetery, sacri- legiously used as a Serbian gun emplacement, from the far
distance appears intact.

Austrian and Ottoman buildings withstand missiles well, in contrast to
buildings made of steel, concrete and cement. For this reason, the historic
buildings in the city centre, as well as the large, more isolated,
Austrian- built Territorial Museum, remain basically unchanged against a
backdrop of huge blackened and opalescent cadavers of high-rise structures
such as the UNIS building or the University. Buildings with architectural
elements of steel fare much worse, such as the Oslobodjenje Newspaper
building which boasts steel elements that have melted under high
temperature, producing Gaudi- or Dali-like effects. Steel window frames
with many glass panels have sagged, the panes hanging from them like items
of laundry on a clothes line.

The Territorial Museum has been under constant fire from the time of
Enver's adventure there. This, the principal museum of Bosnian archaeology,
historical monuments and natural history, sits on "Sniper's Alley." Behind
it, along the Miljacka River, is the present front line, from where
devastating projectiles of varying sorts are intermittently hurled into its
back wall and its court- yard, within which mainly unprotected Roman and
medieval monuments wait to be destroyed. The interior ceilings are painted
daintily on a white ground in Pompeian style, crossed by water stains from
where the cupola sky-lights are broken. No one risks death to cover the
holes in the roof.

Only a stuffed falcon, suspended with wings widespread under the skylight
in the Natural History Department, offer futile protection. Beneath him, a
large hole is punched through the wall.
Marian WENZEL
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
LONDON CONFERENCE - Effects on the Cultural Heritage

On 25 November 1993 Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue and the Courtauld
Institute of Art are jointly organising a seminar to be held at the
Institute to evaluate the effects of the present conflict on the cultural
heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina and to discuss proposals for future
restoration and conservation.

For more information contact:

Dr Anthea Brook, Witt Library,
Courtauld Institute,
Somerset House, The Strand,
London WC2,
United Kingdom,
tel. (71) 873-2726, or

Dr Wenzel,
Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue UK,
9 Canterbury Mansions, Lymington Road,
London NW6 1SE,
tel. (71) 433-1142.

Mike
--
Let them tremble and at the last moment let them comprehend that the
word SARAJEVO from now on will mean the destruction of their sons and
the debasement of their daughters.

They have prepared it by repeating "We at least are safe," unaware that
what will strike them ripens within them." Czeslaw Milosz/Sarajevo