The 1992–1995 war in Bosnia is infamous for the mass ethnic-cleansing, chiefly of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs and, to a lesser degree, Bosnian Croats. It was part of a genocidal strategy to create ethnically pure states within Bosnia. Territory was the goal. But removing people by one means or another was insufficient. Cultural and religious monuments attesting to the rich Islamic history of Bosnia since the fifteenth century had to go as well—and in this the perpetrators were also largely successful. Bosnia and the destruction of cultural heritage recounts this sad story in unrelenting detail. It further addresses the significant post-war challenges to restoring the built cultural heritage throughout Bosnia. The monograph is the first full-scale study of the enormous cultural crimes perpetrated in Bosnia by ethnic nationalists, and of the consequences these crimes have had on the country's heritage and identity since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. There will be those who criticise this monograph for being ‘unbalanced’, but their claims will be unfounded. The documentation presented in this volume is overwhelming and unequivocal.
Let's start with some general figures (Chapter 2). The data are incomplete and unevenly recorded, but the orders of magnitude are disquieting. During the war, approximately 2771 cultural properties were damaged or destroyed. Of these, 713 were completely destroyed and 554 were made unusable by fire. Some 49 of 60 urban centres were destroyed or severely damaged, including structures of renowned importance such as the Mostar Bridge. Turning to sacral structures, 22 of the 58 most valuable mosques and tekije (Ottoman-period schools) were demolished, and of the 40 most important Orthodox and Catholic churches and monasteries, 5 were destroyed and 4 damaged. More generally, there were 1701 mosques in Bosnia before the war; of these 1186 (the low count) were destroyed or damaged, approximately three-quarters by the Serbs and one-quarter by the Croats. We do not have figures for the total number of Catholic churches and chapels before the war, but 188 were destroyed and 392 severely or partly damaged, with just under two-thirds destroyed by the Serbs and up to one-third by Muslim forces. Finally, 121 Serb churches and monasteries were destroyed and 169 damaged; we do not have the figures for the identities of the perpetrators. As the authors observe:
despite the lack of an independent statistical appraisal of classes of monuments destroyed and damaged in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, or an authoritative evaluation of the regional and global significance of the loss [. . .] it is more than apparent that the scale and extent of the destruction of the country's heritage was undeniably without parallel since the Second World War (p. 154).
The credibility of this book is enhanced by the fact that two of the authors (Walasek and Carlton) courageously visited many of the damaged or destroyed heritage monuments shortly after the war ended. Their conclusions are unambiguous:
Virtually the entire architecture of the Bosnian Muslim sacral heritage was comprehensively attacked and decimated in all areas controlled for any period during the war by Bosnian Serb forces, and, to a slightly lesser extent, in areas held by Bosnian Croat forces, amounting to well over 75 per cent of the total land area of the country. However, Christian sacral monuments—Orthodox (Serb) and Catholic (Croat) churches have generally survived well in areas under Bosnian government (largely Muslim) control, particularly in urban contexts [. . .] These findings correspond with the United Nations reports and testimony at ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] prosecutions, which found no policy of ethnic cleansing and the associated destruction of monuments under Bosnian army control (p. 183).
The Dayton Agreement not only ended the war, it also set in place mechanisms for rebuilding the country. Annex 8 of the agreement was designed specifically to address cultural heritage protection. Valery Perry (Chapter 4) is right to applaud the international community for including heritage preservation in the Dayton post-war peace implementation plan. The work of the state-level commission established under Annex 8, while not without its shortcomings and challenges from the administrative entities and cantons established under the agreement, has done much to ensure that Bosnia's cultural heritage is documented and, wherever possible, preserved.
But what to preserve and how? The international community focused on the restoration of iconic sites such as the Mostar Bridge as a way of promoting interethnic reconciliation in the early years after Dayton, but as the ongoing ethnic tensions in Mostar made abundantly clear, this approach proved less than successful. Eventually, as Walasek points out (p. 255), the restoration of cultural heritage is a critical component of development-and-assistance programmes, and an integral part of the refugee-return process. Perhaps the most promising development has been the emerging engagement of the administrative entities and municipalities in cultural reconstruction efforts.
Chapter 6, Amra Hadžimuhamedović’s paper on the restoration of the Čaršija Mosque in Stolac, shows how displaced persons and returnees can be truly instrumental in the restoration of civic trust and human rights in a divided community. The following chapter (7), by Tina Wik, considers the substantial restoration initiatives of the mainly Swedish-funded non-governmental organisation ‘Cultural Heritage without Borders’, in a number of Bosnian towns. Wik reflects on the opportunities and challenges of locally driven, but chiefly foreign-funded, restoration efforts. ‘Cultural Heritage without Borders’ proved operationally effective, but faced many difficult political questions about the nature and scope of cultural restoration and conservation in a “post-conflict, post-socialist and recently independent” Bosnia (p. 281).
Ultimately, one of the most important legacies of the Bosnian war was the elevation of attacks on cultural and religious property to the status of war crimes, discussed by Helen Walasek in Chapter 8. For the first time in international law, there was a remedy for war-time cultural heritage violations in the form of retributive and reparative justice and human rights protections. This legal legacy should certainly be put to the test in Syria, once the war there has been brought to a close.
The second volume under review here, War and cultural heritage edited by Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Dacia Viejo-Rose, addresses war monuments in Denmark, France, Spain, Germany, Serbia, Cyprus and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The case studies take a “biographical approach [. . .] to emphasise the fluidity and dynamism of places” and their meanings in contrast to “singular monolithic interpretations of heritage by policy-makers and heritage-management professionals” (p. 11). All of the case studies are explicit in reiterating this point.
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Inge Adriansen's careful study (Chapter 1) of the Düppel-Denkmal war monument at Dyboøl, Denmark, makes clear that while it was built as a memorial to the Prussian soldiers who died in the successful battle against the Danes in 1864, it was consistently interpreted for many years afterward as a victory monument, leading the authors to observe that “there can be a distinct difference between [. . .] the meanings residing within a monument in terms of its architectural references and [. . .] the social meanings that become attached to the monument” (p. 31). Even more interestingly, the meaning of the memorial has changed radically since the end of the Second World War, serving now, among other purposes, as a memorial monument for both Denmark and Germany.
Chapter 2, by Jean-Paul Amat, Paola Filippucci and Edwige Savouret, is concerned with the reconstruction and memorialisation of the First World War battlefield at Verdun, France. As the authors show, the site “as a tomb, a memorial to the fallen, and a monument to the battle and the war” (p. 52) has been deeply affected ever since the end of the war—indeed, down to the present—by the “interplay of symbolic meaning and material interests” (p. 67) at the local, national and international levels, which makes Verdun, to some degree, a site not just of memory but also of the relentless nature of human conflict.
The next chapter (3), by Dacia Viejo-Rose, analyses the reconstruction of Gernika's Foru Plaza— destroyed during the Spanish Civil War—and the location of its Town Hall. It provides a poignant example of the mixed consequences that attend to efforts at imposing a new symbolism to politically charged communal spaces in the aftermath of war. Similar tensions are apparent in the case of the Dresden Frauenkirche, as illustrated by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Matthias Neutzner in Chapter 4. The church, despite its function as a “key medium for the restoration of the city's proud and collective cultural identity”, carries “ambiguities and tensions” (p. 126) in its historic associations stretching back to the eighteenth century, as well as to the Nazis and the German Democratic Republic of the last century.
Somewhat distinct in subject and perspective from the other papers is the study of the Prison of Carabanchel in Madrid by Alfredo González-Ruibal and Carmen Ortiz (Chapter 5). The authors trace the long and varied history of the now destroyed prison, founded during the Francoist regime, concluding that the memory of the prison “even as a void [. . .] still haunts those who encounter it today” (p. 155).
In Chapter 6, Ben Davenport discusses the evolving meaning and symbolism of the Generalštab, the buildings of the Defence Ministry and Army Staff Headquarters in Belgrade, Serbia, which were bombed in the 1999 NATO war involving Serbia and Kosovo. As the author effectively demonstrates, the Generalštab, built under Tito, has been a symbol of Yugoslav resistance to Soviet Russia and of resistance to Milosevic's nationalist authoritarian regime, and, in the bombing during 1999, of Belgrade's long history of destruction and reconstruction.
The Ledra Palace Hotel, located within the UN Buffer Zone in Cyprus, is seen by Olga Demetriou in Chapter 7 as the embodiment of the Greek Cypriot-Turkish Cypriot conflict that has shaped the island's identity since 1974. The Ledra Palace's original function as a destination for the island's elite and visiting celebrities, its later role as the site of political negotiations and its subsequent ruination and refurbishment testify, for Demetriou, to the need for heritage research to “seriously rethink the ways in which the materiality of heritage is bound up with the intangible aspects of political subjectivity” (p. 207).
The appropriation of national monuments for ethnic-nationalist purposes in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina is a theme of Dzenan Sahovic and Dino Zulumovic's investigation (Chapter 8) of the Kozara monument and memorial complex. They show, sadly, how the meaning of a monumental complex intended to recall Yugoslav partisans who died in the Second World War was ‘corrected’ by local authorities after the 1992–1995 war to reflect its history as a commemorative site where mostly Serbs suffered during the war.
Ioannis Armakolas's study (Chapter 9) considers the “gradual transformation of the Slana Banja” (p. 236) monument group in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzgovina, “from a heritage site of secondary and local importance”, recalling the partisan Yugoslav struggle against the Nazis, “into a characteristic example of the search for post-Yugoslav and pro-Bosnian identity and meaning” (p. 249). This is an especially illuminating perspective on how Bosnia-Herzegovina has struggled politically and, by extension, symbolically to establish a heritage acceptable to all segments of the population since the fall of Yugoslavia. Unlike the Kozara monument and memorial complex, for Slana Banja, the political elites of Tuzla pursued an agenda that emphasised a national Bosnian, rather than an ethnic-nationalist, message after the 1992–1995 war.
In the two postscripts to the volume, David Uzzell and Carsten Paludan-Müller offer some trenchant remarks. Uzzel draws attention to the ongoing tensions associated with the memorialisations of conflict, concluding that in many instances “the presence of these physical and mental memorials only serves to ensure that peace does not follow war” (p. 254). Paludan-Müller puts it equally powerfully:
Conflicts tend to produce simplified narratives of the past, stories with a straightforward theme and plots undisturbed by nuance and complexity. They feed on marked difference—a clear distinction between ‘us and them’ that leaves little room for ambiguity and hybridity [. . .] Perhaps the effort to retrieve the complex, the diverse, and the ambiguous is the most important contribution that we can make within the sphere of cultural heritage (pp. 266–67).
