I am thankful to be invited to share some reflections on the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and on the actions of scholars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and around the world in resisting genocide and in promoting peace, justice, and respect for human dignity in the face of such a tragedy.
During the tragic period in the 1990s, a rhetoric of dismissal developed that suggested the violence in BH was due to an inherent character flaw in “those people over there.” Yet from the outset, it was clear that what was happening “over there” could also happen here in the United States. Now, with the rise of a demagogic national president, the appointment of a white nationalist as presidential adviser on immigration policy, and the racial, religious, and ethnic hatred that has been fostered in such an environment, we find ourselves facing challenges that are not dissimilar to those faced by Yugoslavia in the years prior to its dissolution.Footnote 49
The crimes that occurred in BH are among the most meticulously documented instances of genocidal activity in history. Yet even now, the genocidal activity is being denied. The most notorious current genocide denier is the Austrian writer Peter Handke. Handke spent years fiercely impugning the journalists who reported on the crimes in Bosnia, denying what had occurred even as he refused to visit the survivors of the genocidal acts and refused to look at the evidence and confessions that were presented at the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. When asked if he was not concerned with the victims of the crimes he minimized or denied, he answered, “Stick your concerns up your ass.”Footnote 50 In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet if that act was meant to confer status and respectability on Handke, it failed. The prize has become a badge of shame for both Handke and the Nobel committee that awarded it, and the resistance to and demonstrations against the prize serve as another instance of truth-telling that refused to be silenced or cajoled.
In the spring of 1992, a colleague of mine referred to horrific acts being carried out against Muslims in the newly independent nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the time, I had viewed the situation in the former Yugoslavia exclusively as a civil conflict and war of secession. Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence from the Yugoslav Federation, the Yugoslav army attacked Croatian forces, and Serb militias began carving out territory within Croatia—all tragic aspects of the unraveling of Yugoslavia. Bosnia's declaration of independence in February 1992 led to the siege of Sarajevo and to assaults by heavily armed Serb militias in the countryside.
Alerted by my colleague, I began noticing small articles tucked away in the back section of newspapers that suggested that what was happening in Bosnia-Herzegovina was no longer confined to a war of secession, as tragic and cruel as such wars are. As Serb militias took control of villages, the homes of non-Serbs were destroyed; mosques, shrines, and non-Serb churches were destroyed; and civilians were massacred or taken to detention camps where, it would become clear, they were starved, beaten, tortured, and in many cases killed. As human rights reports and eyewitness reports began detailing these events, it became clear that what was occurring was not isolated or random atrocities committed by undisciplined fighters, but a systematic campaign of eradication—of a people and all traces of their history as well as their religious and cultural identity. Within months, the Croatian army and Croat militias in BH, directed by Croatian president Franjo Tuđjman, began their own campaign to rid areas they claimed for Croatia of their Muslim and Serb populations.
Religious rituals and symbols played a central role in both campaigns. Even prior to the breakup of Yugoslav, Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox prelates had organized massive pilgrimages to sites of World War II atrocities and to holy sites associated with aspirations for a Greater Catholic Croatia and Greater Serbian Orthodox Serbia, and militia campaigns (like the medieval Crusades) were in some cases carried out as forms of pilgrimage. Commemorations of the 1389 death of the Serbian prince Lazar in a battle against the Ottoman Turks took on a particularly potent role in motivating and justifying genocidal acts. Lazar was presented a Christ-figure, surrounded by twelve knights, one of whom would betray him. His death was commemorated as the Serb Golgotha, amid denunciations of Yugoslav Muslims as Christ-killers. In Herzegovina, the rival Catholic factions led by militant Franciscans and the equally militant bishop of Mostar created their own rituals around what was called the Croatian Golgotha. These rituals were mobilized to cast Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims as age-old, mythically eternal antagonists, thereby obscuring the history of the region and the actual situation on the ground, where heavily armed armies and militias supported by Croatia and Serbia sought to carve up Bosnia-Herzegovina into an all-Catholic Croat section and an all-Serb Orthodox section, to eliminate Bosnian Muslim inhabitants, and to annex the ethnically “pure” Croat and Serb regions to Croatia and Serbia, respectively. To that end, they used violence to foment fear of the other and to create the genocidal antagonisms they claimed were ancient. The vision of age-old antagonisms was picked up and popularized by Robert Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts, by European and American politicians, and by opinion writers and columnists. It was that dynamic that led me to write The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia.Footnote 51
At the time I was teaching at Haverford College near Philadelphia. I sent out a letter to my fellow faculty members and received a strong response. Some of us formed a core group, along with my wife, Janet Marcus, which led to the founding of the Community of Bosnia (COB), a nonprofit organization devoted to supporting a multireligious Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some early efforts, such as sending letters or gifts to refugee survivors of the ethnonationalist's genocidal program, were ineffective. We ultimately asked ourselves what we, as academics, might most effectively achieve. We settled on two core programs. The first was the Bosnian student program that sought scholarships to American high schools and universities for Bosnian students whose lives and studies had been placed on hold in overburdened refugee camps. In addition to the scholarships, we sought American host families, as well psychological and medical support to help with the physical and emotional trauma they had experienced. This effort was led by Deborah Cooper of Philadelphia. Approximately fifty students came to the United States under COB sponsorship, most of them to the Philadelphia area. Their lives in BH had been shattered, and they were cast into the challenging roles of learning to operate in a new educational system, overcoming the traumas they had endured, and in many cases supplying hope for their entire families. The vast majority succeeded brilliantly in their studies. They also became voices for their people, appearing on radio and television interviews and in other events. As they spoke of their lives before and their friends across religious boundaries, they broke the spell cast by the age-old antagonisms myth. They were shining lights in a dark time.
Our second program focused on Bosnia's cultural heritage and the systematic effort to erase it and rewrite Bosnian history according to the vision of the ethnonationalists. It became apparent that the systematic destruction of the mosques, monasteries, churches, and other shrines of peoples who were to be “othered” also served as proof of the genocidal program that was underway. Bodies of victims were hidden away and the killings denied, but the empty spaces once occupied by thousands of historic shrines stood as stark and visible testimony. The survivors who witnessed the killings, expulsions, and concentration camps also spoke of the destruction of shrines, and the visible evidence of that destruction dramatized the truthful nature of their witness. The ultimate goal of this program, and those ongoing in BH, was to preserve the memory of the heritage being attacked: for the goal of ethnic cleansing was to destroy a people's identity. Although many might survive as refugees, the signs of their identity would be erased.Footnote 52
In 2002, I visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, where I witnessed the efforts of Bosnians of all religions to rebuild the diverse society that had been devastated in the dark years of 1992–1994. I would now like to recall and reflect upon a few of my encounters during that visit.
Sarajevo
My host in Sarajevo was Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the director of International Forum Bosnia, who arranged interviews with newspaper and magazine journalists and on radio and television, and who took me into the heart of the reconstruction of the historic Begovic mosque in Sarajevo, which had been deliberately targeted by the Serb army during the siege.Footnote 53 In Sarajevo I met up with Marko Orsolić, a Franciscan who gave a riveting lecture at Rosemont College in 1994 and who was fiercely critical of the Franciscans in Herzegovina who collaborated with Croat ethnonationalist militias and had grown wealthy from the lucrative pilgrimage operations in the town of Medjugorje. I joined Marko at his interfaith center, where a diverse group of friends and supporters met to sing the South Slavic love songs (Sevdalinkas) that been sung by generations of Bosnian Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Serbs.
I also met with an Albanian Muslim cleric from Kosovo who described for me the program of Saudi Arabian aid programs, which used financial assistance to instill the doctrine of Saudi Wahhabism, which rejected interreligious cooperation and friendship. In a bitter postscript to the Kosovo war, the Saudi groups gained control of some of the last remaining historic mosques in the region and demolished them, along with the Ottoma–style graveyards that they considered idolatrous.
I also met up with the Community of Bosnia executive director Dzenita Mehic, who had organized the COB Reconnect Program, which offered internships to Bosnians in the United States who wished to return to their shattered homeland and help in the reconstruction efforts there. I and Dzenita and more than two dozen interns met with the UN high commissioner, Paddy Ashdown, for a luncheon that Dzenita had arranged. Ashdown spoke with urgency about the critical need to reverse the brain-drain from BH and the work of the Reconnect Program to contribute to that reversal.
I must mention one other visit in Sarajevo, to the home of Svetlana Broz, the granddaughter of Marshall Tito, who had worked throughout the war as a peace and justice activist. Svetlana wrote a book, titled Good People in an Evil Time, which offered first-person accounts of Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Serbs who resisted the religious nationalist militias and hid or otherwise saved their neighbors, regardless of their ethnicity, often at great risk.Footnote 54 The writers did not write as members of one group standing in solidarity with members of another group, but as human beings who acted to help neighbors and who resisted being put into the rigid ethnic categories being imposed by the militias.
My host in Herzegovina was Amra Hadžimuhamedović, a professor of architecture and a leading expert in the process of implementation of the Annex VIII of the Dayton Agreement, which called for the reconstruction of the heritage deliberately destroyed by the ethnic-cleansing militias. Amra joined a number of other influential cultural leaders of various religions who championed participatory reconstruction. They understood that if each group reconstructed its own shrines, it would further cement the exclusivity that had been the aim of the militants. Instead, they gathered donations from members of all the religious groups for the work on all the shrines. I can mention only three of the many sites I visited with Amra, but they should offer a glimpse into the work being conducted in this area.
Stolac
The town of Stolac sits dramatically perched between tall Herzegovinan hills and the Bregava River. It was the home of Mak Dizdar, Bosnia-Herzegovina's most renowned poet, as well as Rav Danon, a Sephardic Jewish tziddik, or holy man, who had been arrested along with many leader Sephardic Jews in Sarajevo by a corrupt and brutal Ottoman governor. The Sarajevo Sephardim appealed to the Muslim population to help free the prisoners and, according to the epic and ballads celebrating the event and historical accounts, they succeeded. After his death in 1830, Rav Danon's grave became a pilgrimage site for Sephardim throughout the region until the destruction of that community during the Holocaust.Footnote 55
On the road into Stolac from Mostar we came across a large, garish image of the Virgin Mary surrounded by various decorative features and Croat nationalist symbols. It stood in front of the house of one of the war criminals who had carried out the expulsion of Muslims and Serbs from the town and had grown wealthy from the property plundered from them. The shrine sanctified the ethnic cleansing even as it marked the prestige and power of its owner. I asked if we could stop so that I could take a photo of it, but our driver, who lived in the region and was vulnerable to retaliation, was understandably hesitant. Once in town we passed by a café built by another newly prosperous member of the Croat nationalist militia. Frank Sinatra music blared over the tables and chairs placed inside the café and outside in the sidewalk area, but the chairs were empty. Stolac itself seemed empty as well. There were few people on the streets and large areas, formerly occupied by Muslims and Serbs, were deserted.
Later we went up to the Vidoska fortress, an ancient site that dominates the town from its perch on the largest hill in the area. After the 1992 assault on the town, Croat nationalists had erected a cross on the site, which they later replaced with a larger stone cross constructed with material looted from the ancient fortress. On the path up to the fortress, they constructed a series of fourteen crosses, turning the path into a “Way of the Cross.” That Way of the Cross appeared to be the bishop of Mostar's effort to rival the Way of the Cross constructed by his militant Franciscan rivals at the pilgrimage site in Medjugorje.Footnote 56
My most vivid experience in Stolac occurred at the site of the Careva mosque, constructed in 1519. The Croatian Defence Council (HVO) destroyed it in 1992 along with eight other mosques, the Orthodox Church of the Holy Assumption of Christ, a historic Orthodox church in a neighboring village, as well as Ottoman-period schools, residential areas, urban neighborhoods, bazaars, and Muslim homes throughout the vicinity. Amra pointed out to me an area near the Bregava River where the Croat nationalists had transported and then hidden the rubble from the Careva mosque in order to prevent any future reconstruction. That aim was thwarted by Amra and her colleagues who, alerted by a witness, found the dumping site, retrieved the stones and fragments, and painstakingly pieced together the stone jigsaw puzzle in preparation for reconstruction. She showed me the stacks of building stones, many of them numbered to mark where they would fit into the structure. When the reconstruction began, former HVO members and the local Catholic priest took part in riots protesting it. Archbishop Peric of Mostar launched a furious resistance to the efforts and boycotted a meeting among Catholic, Serb, and Muslim religious leaders that had been set up to promote reconciliation. Amra and her colleagues, faced with the violence, then worked to reorganize Annex VIII of the Dayton Agreement, which called for the reconstruction of all the destroyed shrines in Bosnia. Throughout our visit we were watched, and I reflected on the determination and resilience of those who resisted the genocide while it was happening, and who, after the war, were undaunted in resisting the efforts of ethnoreligious nationalists to perpetuate the violence and forced segregation. As the Careva mosque reconstruction recommenced, Muslims who had been driven from the city gained the confidence to return, despite the ongoing intimidation from those who had attacked them ten years earlier. I thought of the quiet courage and steely determination of Amra and her colleagues who traveled throughout areas still under the control of Croat and Serb militants to inspect the sites of the shrines, map the rubble for future reconstruction, and gather accounts of what had happened.
Žitomislić
Žitomislić is a Serbian Orthodox Monastery that was constructed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, famous for its magnificent iconostasis. The HVO destroyed it in 1992 and drove out the monks and the Serb families who lived in the area. Amra told me that a team of graduate architecture students from Sarajevo would meet us at the site as part of their study of the architectural heritage of BH. We arrived at a fortunate time. As Amra and I left the car, we encountered two young men. Amra introduced us to them, and they explained that they were with the newly appointed Serb Orthodox elder (iguman), who would attempt to revive the monastic community. We met the iguman further up on the hill, near the reconstruction site. Amra introduced herself and the graduate students, and offered the iguman a brief update on what scholars had learned about the monastery as they took part in and observed the reconstruction activity. Amra, who was deeply familiar with the site, then showed the iguman to the graves of the monks and other members of the Žitomislić community, who had been murdered in 1942 by the Ustaša militia of the World War II fascist state of Croatia.
Mostar
Mostar is the capital and crown jewel of Herzegovina. In 1993, Mostar resident and expert on its heritage, Amir Pasic, visited Philadelphia at the invitation of professors of architecture Brooke Harrington at Temple University and July Bing at Drexel University. Haverford College invited him to give a lecture there while he was in town. Amir had played a leading role in the renewal of the old city of Mostar, which was conducted in a manner that resisted the gentrification that would have forced longtime residents out of the core area. The reconstruction won the 1987 Aga Khan award for the preservation of heritage. When the HVO began their assault on the Serb and Muslim population of the city, they systematically destroyed all the churches, mosques, monasteries, and other shrines of the Muslims and Orthodox Serbs whose presence they intended to eliminate once and for all. Those monuments that they could not dynamite, they shelled from a distance. They attempted to obtain the plans for the Mostar old town reconstruction so that they could eradicate the city's heritage systematically by digging down and effacing the deeper levels of construction. Pasic escaped with the plans and organized the Mostar 2004 program dedicated to the study and preservation of Mostar's heritage and its diverse social fabric. The program drew faculty and students from across Europe and North America to its workshops and lectures, which were held in Istanbul while the town was under siege, and afterward in Mostar. After Amir's talk in Haverford, he gave me an invitation to what he projected as the 2004 celebration of the reconstructed bridge and other sites. He presented the invitation not as a prophecy, but rather as a way of calling attention to the fate of Mostar and gaining support for the beleaguered town and its inhabitants.
During my stay in Mostar, I visited Amir at his workshop, where I encountered a hive of intense activity taking place in an atmosphere of great calm and collegiality. Two years later, in 2004, the town and international visitors celebrated the installation of a meticulously designed replica of the Stari Most, the balletic high arched bridge that dramatically spans the Neretva River and had served as a symbol of the town and of Herzegovina more widely since its construction in 1551.
As I was preparing to leave Mostar, someone pointed out that a man had been watching me from the hotel lobby throughout my stay. I recognized his name as an art historian who had provide expertise to the HVO so that the militia would know where to find Muslim and Serb artifacts and lesser known monuments and advance their aim of obliterating every trace of the peoples they were expelling from the region. As an international visitor, I was in no danger, but those in the area that were working on interreligious reconciliation and heritage reconstruction did so under the threat of harassment and violence.
Conclusion
In his 2004 report on the Mostar program, Amir Pasic wrote that although the physical heritage of Mostar and other sites had been reconstructed, much work needed to be done to repair the city's torn social fabric.Footnote 57 The international agencies and philanthropies that had financed much of the construction had been too impatient to work through the town's own emerging networks and had set up their own parallel organizations, thus losing the opportunity to bring the town's residents more fully into the reconstruction effort. The same can be said for other areas of BH. The ethnonationalist genocidal program was thwarted in 1995, but its aim of dividing the country has been partially realized. The Dayton Peace Accords that ended the killing were imperfect and left a government divided and partially paralyzed, and schools segregated along ethnonationalist lines. Still, the situation is immeasurably better than might have been hoped for during the war years. Large numbers of refugees have returned and their property has been restored, and dozens of war criminals have been held accountable at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Younger Bosnians, long kept down by the nepotism of the post-communist ruling elite, may bring new vision and vitality to addressing the serious challenges that remain. Bosnia-Herzegovina will not return to its prewar state, but it will likely find its way. And the efforts of those of all religions and no religion who resisted the ethnic and religious hatred being inflicted on the nation serve as an inspiration for all societies threatened by the dark forces that came close to their aim of destroying that nation and rewriting its history. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, academics contribute to these efforts. Scholars of religion outside this beautiful country can follow and support them, thereby overcoming the ideological walls that would have them consigned to “primitive peoples” inevitably bound to hate and kill one another.Footnote 58
