Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War

301 Pages·2017·3.22 MB·English

by  Adis Maksić (auth.)

The Serb
Democratic
Party and the
Bosnian War
A d i s M a k s i ć
Ethnic Mobilization, Violence,
and the Politics of Affect
Adis Maksić
Ethnic Mobilization,
Violence, and the
Politics of Affect
The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War
Adis Maksić
International Burch University
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
ISBN 978-3-319-48292-7 ISBN 978-3-319-48293-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48293-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932893
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To the memory of my father and Džemka
P
rologue
In October 2004, I stood in a crowd of nearly 35,000 spectators who
filled Sarajevo’s Olympic Stadium to watch a World Cup qualifier between
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro. The recent political his-
tory of the two countries ensured that this would not be an ordinary soc-
cer game. For home fans, the event was an opportunity for expressing
anger and animosity that stemmed from the involvement of Serbia and
Montenegro in the 1992–1995 Bosnian War. Upon hearing the sound of
the visiting side’s National Anthem, most of the crowd reacted by whis-
tling or turning their backs to the field. Yet, the bits of the tune that fought
through a concert of whistles were also creating a moment of irony. The
Anthem was Hej sloveni (Hey, Slavs), the same one that the people in the
stands would only a dozen years earlier greet with thunderous ovations.
Then, it was the Anthem of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
a former common state of the two sides that were now facing off on the
soccer pitch.
I believe that we can learn much about national self-understandings by
pausing to think about a diversity of sensibilities that a performance such
as Hej sloveni can mobilize in a single audience. The challenge here is to
understand how contextual positioning can alter the meaning of a song, a
symbol, or a speech act so that it produces widely different affective expe-
riences. For Bosnians of all ethnic backgrounds, Hej sloveni had a recog-
nizable tune, having been performed innumerable times in the past. Until
the early 1990s, it represented a national self. When played in 2004 as an
anthem of Serbia and Montenegro, many associated it with the resented
ethnic “other.” The meanings of each performance were also affected
vii
viii PROLOGUE
by previous usage. Lurking in the background of the intense anger and
animosity that the playing of Hej sloveni triggered in the context of the
2004 soccer game were the more pleasing emotional imprints of the times
when the Anthem mobilized no less intense feelings of national pride.
This is why many of those same people who whistled and turned their
backs to Hej sloveni would approve of it with nostalgia when situated in a
performance that memorializes the lost times of the Yugoslav state. This is
why an activist of the Bosniak ethno-national SDA party recently told me
that he was proud of his involvement in armed mobilization of Muslims
in his village near Sarajevo and the role in “bringing down Yugoslavia,”
only to add a short time later that he still got “chills” upon hearing Hej
sloveni, and lament the destruction of Yugoslavia. Hej sloveni here testifies
to the existence of two eras in which Bosnians had two radically different
national self-understandings, neither of which was more “real” and natural
than the other.
One of the larger arguments of this work is that to understand con-
flicts fought in the name of an identity we must dispose of the assumption
that collective self-understandings are arranged into a stable hierarchy.
Rather, we need to analyze the dynamic sociopolitical processes that
produce their evolution across space and time, the processes in which
the political elites often have a decisive influence. As I researched these
processes, I began recalling the experiences of Bosnia’s turbulent polit-
ical developments of the early 1990s that produced the evolution of
national self- understandings of myself and my family. I decided to briefly
share some of them here for several reasons: to reveal my positionality as
a researcher, to illustrate the dynamics of ethno-politicization examined
in this study through the actual experiences of one Bosnian family, and
to offer a representative example that shows the evolution of identities
over time and space.
For the latter purpose, I begin with generational differences. My
maternal grandparents hailed from two villages in Eastern Herzegovina,
a deeply ethnicized area with an extensive history of intercommunal
conflict. Both were Muslims who narrowly escaped the murderous
campaigns of Serb Četnik forces during World War II. My grandfather’s
father and brother were not so lucky. The Četniks murdered them by
throwing them into a deep natural pit. After World War II, my grand-
father spent time in prison for being affiliated with Mladi Muslimani
(Young Muslims), an underground organization that fought for greater
religious rights of Muslims in the communist Yugoslavia. One of his
PROLOGUE ix
prison mates was Alija Izetbegović, the future Bosnian Muslim leader
and president of Bosnia. My paternal grandparents were also devout
Muslims from Herzegovina, albeit without the comparable suffering.
If we subscribe to the traditional understandings of ethnicity, my fam-
ily would seem as a prime candidate for the perpetuation of ethnic self-
understandings across different generations. Both grandparents had a
strong sense of ethno-religious belonging, with one grandfather having
connections to a dissident Muslim movement. Yet, a seemingly unre-
markable event, their move from Herzegovina to the Bosnian capital
of Sarajevo, disrupted this continuity in ways that marginalized old and
produced new axes of identification. My parents were born in Sarajevo
at a time when Bosnia was undergoing urbanization and industrializa-
tion, which resulted in a large influx of people from mono-ethnic villages
into the flourishing multi-ethnic cities. It was also a time when the com-
munist regime promoted “brotherhood and unity” of Yugoslav peoples
while discouraging the main set of practices that differentiated them—
the religious expression. In a sharp contrast to the field of socialization
of the deeply ethnicized Herzegovinian environment, many of my par-
ents’ childhood friends, classmates, teachers, neighbors, and colleagues
were non-Muslims. Since there was no language barrier that followed
ethnic lines, there was little to prevent these interactions from grow-
ing into dense and emotionally felt ties that could define a community
to which my mother and father felt a sense of belonging. Such expe-
riences, in conjunction with the regime’s policy of “brotherhood and
unity”, helped them acquire a strong sense of being a Yugoslav. Despite
the wishes of their parents, and in contrast to the deeply felt Yugoslav
identity, their awareness of belonging to a Muslim ethno-national cat-
egory was only vague and passionless. My father, a former student of
the Muslim Madrasa, joined thousands of other Bosnians of all ethnic
backgrounds in embracing the ruling ideology and becoming an active
member of the communist party.
Being born to the parents with such self-understandings meant that I
would be even further distanced from those of my grandparents. Indeed,
growing up in Yugoslavia of the 1980s, I did not have any sense of belong-
ing to a Muslim ethno-religious category. I was simply a Yugoslav and a
Sarajevan. I can say with confidence that most of my primary school class-
mates, who I can retrospectively identify as a mix of ethnic Serbs, Croats,
Bosniaks, and several others whose ethnic background I am still unable to
ascertain, felt the same. I can recall only two traces of ethnic practices that
x PROLOGUE
connected me to the era of my grandparents. One was a prayer from the
Koran that my grandmother taught me and instructed me to recite every
night at bedtime. Another was the marking of the Muslim Eid holiday by
spending the day at my maternal grandparents’ house. Moreover, I didn’t
experience these practices as indicators of ethnic belonging. The Koranic
verse was something to be recited for good luck as protection against
evil spirits. The Eid celebration was not so much my holiday as that of
my grandparents. In contrast, November 29, the Yugoslav Day of the
Republic, was one of my favorite times of the year.
It was the process of ethno-politicization in Bosnia analyzed in this
study that radically restructured my own conception of collective belong-
ing in ways that linked it to those of my grandparents and, hence, to the
field of meanings of rural Herzegovina of the early twentieth century. I
vaguely recall the dramatic January 1990 exit of the Slovenian delegation
from the 14th congress of the Yugoslav League of Communists as the first
challenge to my idealistic perception of Yugoslavia as a natural country
and an indisputable reality. My father, a committed party member, reacted
to the event by lamenting what he perceived to be the Slovenian attempts
to secede from Yugoslavia, and praising Serbia’s party leader Slobodan
Milošević for what he saw as a resolute struggle to protect the country
against separatism. I recall his enthusiastic statement that in hindsight
seems surreal: “this Milošević, he is good, he is tough.” The congress
marked not only the demise of the party-state regime but also the emer-
gence of new political actors and narratives that began to question the
interpretations of history and national identity that I theretofore held as
simple, undeniable truths. In the following months, I remember hearing
more and more about nationalist movements that were gaining mass sup-
port in some parts of Yugoslavia. Yet, since a label “nationalist” came with
such negative connotations in my microworld that it was akin to an insult;
my parents and I perceived the nationalists as little more than an outlier
comparable to a marginal underclass, or even a criminal, group.
I recall the first event that genuinely destabilized the perceptions that
my parents and I held as the taken-for-granted truths as the moment of
emotional disturbance. The event was a friendly soccer game held in the
spring of 1990 between Yugoslavia and the Netherlands in Zagreb, the
capital of the then-Yugoslav republic of Croatia. We gathered to watch
the broadcast, only to hear our Anthem, Hej sloveni, drowned in whis-
tles and boos by what was formally the home crowd. We watched in
shock as the insults directed at our team continued for the duration of
PROLOGUE xi
the game. In the following days, the event seemed like the only topic
of conversations. The reaction was the same by everyone, including
my grandparents— outrage at Croat nationalism, which at the time
seemed to only reenergize our love for Yugoslavia.
Yet, only more disturbance was on the way. I was spending the summer
of 1990 on the Croatian coast with family when the Croatian TV broad-
cast the event of the lowering of a Yugoslav flag in Zagreb and the rais-
ing of the historic checkerboard flag that the new nationalist Croatian
government restored as the republic’s official symbol. I remember my
uncle Mirsad’s outrage, accentuated by a hope that the Yugoslav People’s
Army (JNA) would forcibly remove the Croatian nationalists led by Franjo
Tuđman. Indeed, whomever we perceived to be the enemy of Yugoslavia
was the enemy of ourselves. In the summer of 1990, Tuđman was the vil-
lain. When the object of this study, the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia
and Herzegovina (SDS BiH), first emerged in July 1990, the event did not
leave any memorable emotions precisely because we did not feel it to be a
threat to Yugoslavia at the time.
The summer of 1990 also brought to my immediate environment the
passions of the campaign for Bosnia’s first multi-party elections, which
were held in November. We were suddenly learning about the resurgent
Ustaše and Četnici movements, and hearing new narratives that questioned
our deeply ingrained binaries of historical heroes and villains. My percep-
tions of Ustaše and Četnici had been formed by the regime’s official his-
torical narratives that portrayed both movements as the fascist, murderous
hordes that the heroic Yugoslav partisans defeated during World War II to
restore the rule of the good over evil. I also recall my grandparents’ stories
of the Četnik atrocities they experienced in eastern Herzegovina. Yet, the
regime’s portrayals seemed to have left a mark, insofar as I never associ-
ated Ustaše with Croat nationalists, or Četnici with Serbs. For me, and for
many others, both movements simply belonged to the negative side of the
Partisan self/Fascist other binary that grounded the dominant narrative
of the World War II events in Yugoslavia. They also belonged to the past.
While I wondered how Ustaše and Četnici could possibly reappear in the
present, the inertia of what I held as a natural order of history assured
me that such forces of evil did not stand a chance. Indeed, most people
in my surroundings were convinced that either a reformed communist
party or the “reformists” of the Federal prime minister Ante Marković
would soundly win the elections. My grandparents, however, expressed
their intent to vote for the Muslim ethno-national party, SDA. I recall my