Sarajevo
Walking around the central city of Sarajevo, you could be forgiven for thinking that the city has fully recovered. Markets and shops are active, and foreign banks and grocery chains have brightly-appointed branch offices and storefronts. Many buildings still show signs of quick patchwork where bullets and shrapnel once did their work, but this does not detract from an overall impression of normal activity.
These appearances are deceptive, because this is also the area that houses foreign embassies and missions like OSCE, so the mostly young people who work here are among a relative few in Sarajevo who have regular employment, and each of them is likely the main breadwinner for an entire family. The older people who live in the neighborhoods on the hills ringing the city center have pensions, but these are meager and the World Bank is suggesting that they be cut even further. The state is extraordinarily dysfunctional, with a complicated electoral system where people vote for seats dedicated to one of the three ethnic groups, including a three-way presidency. It is not clear how much the government actually does apart from providing patronage jobs to the ethnic political parties. Much of its revenue comes from foreign aid and development sources, and funding for cultural activities falls by the wayside: the National Museum and the former Museum of the Revolution (now a museum of Bosnian history) are neglected, with their libraries closed because they do not have heat.
One of the most recognizable buildings in town is the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian city hall which was later the National Library of Bosnia. The Austrians attempted to imitate the architectural style of the city's earlier Ottoman rulers; the result was a strange but beautiful amalgam, the façade of which managed to avoid the effects of shelling and bullets during the last war. The interior caught on fire, though, and after a dozen years of peace, it is still boarded up. There is a rumor that the Austrian government provided money to restore it, but that the funds got lost in the kleptomaniacal Bosnian bureaucracy.
Former city hall and National Library, Sarajevo
Most people here are secular and modernist in their mentality even if they hold some religious beliefs and even stronger and more bitter nationalist resentments. The desperation of the war years did create some space for the growth of religious cults. The Hare Krishna movement set up shop here during the siege and used delicious Indian food to hook in hungry young people who otherwise subsisted on plain rice and Vietnam-era US Army MREs. Even more disturbing than this bizarre but quietist Hindu sect is the growth of "Wahhabi" Islam among a small but increasingly belligerent subset of Bosnian Muslims. Bosnia saw an influx of Arab and other Muslim mujahideen during the war; they arrived at the invitation of the Izetbegović government, and saw Bosnia as one more front in a war with hotspots as disparate as Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Most Bosnian Muslims -- let alone Croats and Serbs -- found their doctrines alien and their sectarian militancy disturbing. Yet their austere theology and reactionary politics eventually found some Bosnian sympathizers as the war dragged on, and as rural Muslims fleeing the Četnik massacres in places like Srebrenica arrived in Sarajevo to settle permanently (often in the former homes of Serbs and Croats who had fled the city and even the country altogether).
Islam in Bosnia is of the Sunni/Sufi variety dominant in Turkey, and the sect dominant in Saudi Arabia -- called wahhabi by everyone here -- has no historical roots here. Its presence is of recent vintage. Today we entered the most famous mosque in Sarajevo, the mosque of Gazi Huzrev Beg. It was designed by Mimar Sinan, the legendary 16th-century Ottoman architect who designed the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul (as well as his masterpiece mosque, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne). As the major Muslim landmark in the city, it was shelled by the Četniks during the war, and was "restored" in 1996 by a Saudi aid agency. The building's interior still has beauty, although its decoration was more colorful and traditionally Ottoman before the last war. The exterior, meanwhile, has a truly odd look: the Ottoman-era stone above a certain height was covered over in a sort of whitewash unlike anything I had seen in Istanbul. All of this is the work of the wahhabis, who frown on all extravagance or ornamentation like the strictest of Christian Protestant iconoclasts. The Gazi Husrev Beg mosque -- and others, I am sure -- is now a place of contestation between most Bosnian Muslims on the one hand and the new wahhabi sect on the other. Most Bosnian Muslims consider what has been done to this mosque to be a mutilation, even a desecration. There are also intense and petty disputes about the "correct" Islamic way to pray, and reports of wahhabis harrassing Muslim women who enter the mosque without the head coverings deemed necessary by wahhabi standards.
Gazi Husrev Beg mosque, Sarajevo. Entrance as seen from its courtyard
Gazi Husrev Beg mosque, Sarajevo, with recently whitewashed dome and minaret
The respective political parties favored by the ethnic groups are getting even worse than before, with an extreme nationalist winning the Serb presidency while openly stating that he wants to hold a referendum for Republike Srpska to join Serbia, and with an equally hardline candidate from the "Party for Bosnia and Hercegovina" displacing the candidate of the SDA (Izetbegović's party) among Muslims. The former Communists (SDP) were pleasantly able to capture the Croat presidency as the Croat nationalists split and progressive-minded Muslims and Serbs crossed over to vote in the Croat election in order to help the SDP. There is only so much you can do in this position, of course. Ethnic nationalism is still the main axis of politics, and among the country's Muslim plurality (which in Sarajevo is now a heavy majority) there is not yet an openly religious party, though that seems to be only a matter of time.
SDP election poster, Sarajevo, 2006. "Choose justice!"