It's No Accident

Sarajevo as seen from the ruins of the Jajce Fortress, January 1, 2007. From this view it is possible to glimpse an Orthodox church, a Catholic church, and the Gazi Husrev Beg mosque (among others), with the Jewish synagogue on the opposite bank of the shallow Miliacka River.

The Bosnian authorities (in manner of speaking) find a way to make themselves look ridiculous every day. Yesterday they did it by announcing on television that sales of fireworks were forbidden in Sarajevo and would be strictly controlled. This a day after the frequent sound of firecrackers on Bajram. The New Year's holiday was even more incendiary. The semi-legal stalls in the bazaars all had heaping piles of fireworks and bottle rockets available for open-air sale, and teenagers walked around setting them off regularly. A stray spark at one of the fireworks stalls in the crowded bazaar might well have produced a massacre reminiscent of the war, but there were no such disasters this year. There are no professional fireworks displays, but private purchase of these miniature explosives is so widespread that the entire city was crackling with them at midnight. The fireworks were augmented by small-arms fire into the smog-ridden night sky (I hope they were blanks, but I doubt it) as well as the unmistakable report of a machine gun.

The weather grew warmer and the oppressive fog lifted today, making worthwhile a visit to the old neighborhood situated around some small Ottoman fortifications. The highest of these (Jajce Fortress) affords a spectacular view both of the city and -- on the other side -- the mountain passes out of town, crisscrossed by bridges and tunnels. The fortress once housed a remote Ottoman prison, with its remaining outer walls conforming closely to the shape of the cliff so as to foreclose any possibility of escape. It is widely believed that this prison was the one featured in Bosnia's greatest novel, Meša Selimović's Derviš i smrt (translated into English as Death and the Dervish). The novel never expressly names its setting as Sarajevo, though its descriptions -- including the prison in a mountain fortress -- leave little room for doubt.

Ruins of an Ottoman prison at Jajce Fortress, Sarajevo. This prison held the brother of Ahmed Nurudin, the agonized 17th-century alterego of Meša Selimović

At the bottom of the hill, just before the baščaršija (bazaar area of the Ottoman old city), there is a tightly-packed cemetery with hundreds of recent Muslim tombstones. This is for soldiers of the Bosnian Army killed in the last war, but unlike other national cemeteries (Arlington, for instance) it is faith-specific. Only Muslims are buried here, and all Muslim soldiers killed in the war are classified as šahid (martyrs of the faith), a curious choice for a government that claimed to have been defending a multiethnic and multiconfessional society against nationalist aggression. But there were plenty of lies of convenience to be attributed to all the armed protagonists here. And the nationalists of all sides clearly got something: the death of a truly multiethnic society. Marina reports that there were several religiously mixed cemeteries before the war, but now even the corpses are strictly segregated. It is tempting to point out how reminiscent of the Old South this is, but the analogy doesn't fit, because in Bosnia you can't point to one group as the clear oppressor and the other as the defenseless out group, more sinned against than sinning. Everyone is guilty. And of the Partisan tradition, very little remains -- though you are now able to buy Tito nostalgia items on the street, something you would not have been able to do in the first few years after the war.

The author and his wife at an Ottoman gate in the old city of Sarajevo, January 1, 2007. The Muslim Brigade of the Partisans led the other units into the city in triumph through this gate in April of 1945.

Since this is my last full day in Bosnia, and really the last of my vacation (I leave for Vienna by bus tomorrow morning, in preparation for my flight home on the 3rd), I'll make a few further observations on the unusual and the ridiculous in the former Yugoslavia.

Of all the nationalist stupidities you can encounter in the former Yugoslav republics -- and they are legion -- there is none that quite matches the hyper-politicized idiocy over its main language. Serbo-Croatian is the proper name of the language spoken in most of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia; it is a language that, in its written form, uses both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Other large languages of Yugoslavia included Slovenian (spoken in Slovenia, of course), Bulgarian (spoken in Macedonia, though of course they call it Macedonian), and the two non-Slavic languages of Hungarian (spoken in some parts of the Serbian region of Vojvodina) and Albanian (spoken in Kosovo). Of all of these, Marina only knows one, but over the course of the trip I watched her deftly speak three "languages": in Serbia, she spoke "Serbian"; in Croatia, she spoke "Croatian"; and in Bosnia, she ludicrously spoke some newly-named language called "Bosnian." Had we made it to Montenegro, I know for a fact that she would have spoken "Montenegrin."

It is difficult to describe just how willfully dumb a native speaker has to be to maintain that these are separate languages, but people do it all the time, and will get angry with those who refuse to acknowledge the alleged distinction. As a native speaker of (American Standard) English, I have encountered people from Jamaica and Scotland whose speech is more difficult for me to understand than the speech of a Hercegovinian farmer would be to a native of Belgrade, but the rube who goes around insisting that he "speaks American" is a figure of satire who (I hope) does not exist in real life, and no one would claim that the Scottish brogue is a different language entirely. When there are actual differences of vocabulary -- as opposed to accent or emphasis -- between the different dialects of Serbo-Croatian, they are stuff on the order of the way the British call elevators "lifts" (or, if you prefer, the way Americans call lifts "elevators"). You could sit down last night in Sarajevo and watch television stations broadcasting from Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Zagreb and Belgrade, each featuring a different set of godawful turbofolk performers for the New Year's holiday, and if even the most extreme Muslim nationalist had said he couldn't understand the Belgrade channel because it lacked subtitles, he would have been ridiculed. So to some extent, the game should be up.

But it's not. When you buy a bootleg DVD of an American movie on the streets of Sarajevo, the menu will likely allow you to choose subtitles in Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian. The Serbian option is admittedly less ludicrous -- it basically means that the subtitles will be in the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Roman -- but as for the other two, it is a bit like having a choice between English subtitles that will have the words "colour" and "trousers" instead of "color" and "pants." Meanwhile, my Croatian in-laws speak the dialect most common in Serbia (Lipovac is on the Serbian border, after all), but refer to it as "Croatian" and occasionally correct themselves in trying to adopt a more properly Croatian vocabulary. Thus everyone in this wounded ex-country clings to a militant parochialism that desperately wishes it to have been worthwhile to have committed national suicide, because that is what these people have done: killed their real nation --Yugoslavia -- and exchanged it for a set of downright laughable mini-states. At least other peoples who have experienced national political indignities like this do not glory in the division. I am told that Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic are so different that they are mutually unintelligible for most intents and purposes, but no Moroccan would deny an Iraqi his identity as an Arabic speaker and his dignity as an Arab, or vice versa. Arab culture is broad and diverse and stretches over a milennium and a half, yet its people take pride in its commonality despite the often bloody political and religious divisions of the Arab world. Not so for the South Slavs, or at least not anymore.

Bosnians in particular are painfully obvious in displaying a self-loathing sense of cultural inferiority. A current example of this is the fiasco of Semir Osmanagić, a crackpot self-proclaimed archaeologist who has written pseudo-histories about Atlantis and what-have-you. He has lately been rooting around a hill near Visoko, convinced that it is actually a pyramid built by an ancient Bosnian civilization. It is unclear how many Bosnians actually take his claims seriously, although the "excavation" has become an oddball tourist attraction providing lucrative opportunities for spinoff merchandise. Visoko is not far from Sarajevo (it is between here and Zenica), but we did not go. Though the schemes of Osmanagić -- an expatriate now based in Houston, Texas -- are not government-funded, he does appear to have the government's indulgence. This is culturally criminal, especially since the government is so negligent in protecting the country's real cultural legacy -- not least of all in Visoko itself, since the town was the seat of a medieval Bosnian kingdom and legitimate archaeologists are worried that Osmanagić will damage genuine archaeological sites. It also would not hurt the government to restore some of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian sites in Sarajevo, and maybe even station a few cops up at the old ruins in the hills to prevent teenagers from spraypainting their names all over them.

Other odd developments in Sarajevo are not so sad and frustrating, but merely surprising and strange. I refer to the appearance of dozens of stores run by Chinese immigrants and selling cheap Chinese products, especially clothing. One stretch of road leading into the city towards the bus station is a veritable kineskigrad of these shops, with the clearly Chinese names of the proprietors on the signs. I haven't the slightest idea what brings these people to Sarajevo of all places. If their presence continues to grow, perhaps one day they will at long last provide occasion for unity among the city's hitherto-warring ethnic groups: Bosnia will never be a truly European country until it has seen a riot against non-white immigrants.

In all seriousness, though, I am not sure that Bosnia will ever be a "normal" country if things continue the way they are now. And I am not sure there is a whole lot of hope, either. The other night, as we were getting off a tram, a middle-aged passenger was stumbling around and got in Marina's way a few times. His way of apologizing was to take pride in his inebriation, and he was not the first person I'd encountered in the Balkans who did this. Heavy drinking is the most widely-accepted way to celebrate the Muslim holidays here. "Excuse me, miss!" he announced, "I'm drunk! Very drunk! Drunk as a future revolution that this country will never see!"

For me, there is no avoiding the conclusion that that future revolution is still Bosnia's last best hope. But in that respect, maybe Bosnia is a country like any other, after all.

Mountain passes to the east of Sarajevo, as seen from Jajce Fortres