Bosnia and Herzegovina: “The Power Lies with the People.”

 

 

Multicultural Sarajevo 

 A melodic chant drowned the raucous sounds of Old Town in Sarajevo. We sat in black wooden chairs facing the chancel in the Serbian Orthodox Museum.  A couple crossed themselves in front of holy images. Two women—young, English-speaking, wearing hijabs—were full of questions for the docent. Back on the crowded ancient alleyways of Old Town, at the wall surrounding a Bosnian Mosque, I paused to fill my water bottle at the well. Entering the courtyard, we sat in the shade, listening to the call to prayer. The faithful removed their shoes and entered the gender-divided stages to kneel and pray.

Three blocks later, we passed the massive Cathedral, standing between Stari Grad and the Austro-Hungarian corridor. For Sarajevans of every and no faith, it is an icon. During the first weeks of June, we watched graduating classes gather there to take photos with the majestic church in the background.  The “White Armband” March began in front of it, and a protest against Israel’s siege of Gaza ended there. 

Back in Old Town, squeezed between the Orthodox Church and Mosque, is a Jewish Temple, used by a community with roots in Spain’s 1492 expulsion.The quiet inside was as reverent as the Muslim call to prayer and the Orthodox Christian chant. Like so many other Synagogues in Europe, it became a museum after World War II. Climbing broad wooden steps to the top floor, I peered into the pages of a three-foot book hanging from the ceiling, listing the 12,000 Sarajevo Jews who perished in German concentration camps, and read about Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Partisan Bosnians who took heroic risks to save their Jewish neighbors in 1941.

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These stories of solidarity amidst the diverse mash of Abrahamic faiths, all within a few blocks, might lead you to believe Sarajevo is a multicultural utopia. But you would have to ignore the exhibits and memorials at every turn, reminding you that from 1991-1996, an ethnic genocide and fratricidal war happened here. Though there is no fighting today, neither is there reconciliation. 

Sarajevo: locus of war crimes between neighbors. 

The fall of the Soviet Union led to the political collapse of Titoism, economic chaos, and violence in the former Yugoslavia. The fratricide wars (1991-1996)in what became Bosnia and Herzegovina divided communities along ethnic and religious lines. The United Nations created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 while the wars in Bosnia were still raging. It existed until 2011, making precedent-setting legal determinations of war crimes and genocide, “that can not be denied.” It tried, convicted, and jailed individuals deemed responsible. The convicted included high-level politicians, showing that on an international level at least, power and position could not shield one from prosecution.  We look to the Yugoslav case today as the United Nations strives to adjudicate genocide in Gaza, convict those responsible, and end the violence. 

Two doors down from our apartment, the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide provided a harrowing Muslim Bosniak perspective of the wars. Like the Hiroshima museum in Japan, it focused on personal testimonies: we ate dandelions until they were all gone, and we used cigarettes as money. Public art, music, and especially theater, became more important, even as audiences and performers sat hungry in theaters, wondering if they’d survive the trip home. The way people interacted changed. “You said what you thought,” one woman testified: “There was no time to hide love, anger, or fear.” A video showed Sarajevans running from snipers like deer, as they sought water.  We watched in a room papered with fervent wishes of visitors, most about Palestine: This is happening now, only worse. How do we stop it?

We took in half a dozen other Sarajevo exhibits on the war:  family-owned museums, tucked into picturesque alleys, placards on flora, fauna, war, and genocide, on a wooded path on Trebević Mountain, a photograph of grief, on the celebratory plaza facing City Hall. Inside the grand municipal building, a virtuoso cellist played in the atrium. In 1992, 22 people were killed standing in a bread line. Musician Vedran Smallovic played his cello in the bombed-out City Hall for 22 days. In 1994, the Sarajevo Philharmonic played in the still-destroyed building. Extensive exhibits throughout the building tell the story of the treasured ancient library that was destroyed.  Outside, marble plaques—one in Bosnian, one in English—remind you it was a deliberate crime and name the ethnic group of those responsible.

The National History Museum—once a place to view the progress of Titoism—is now focused on the 1990s wars. Their most unique and moving contribution to the narrative is a room with the accouterments of a dilapidated post-war Sarajevo apartment. We sat on the creaky couch and watched a video of young people, sent to Germany as children to escape the war, recount their reentry trauma. They were still struggling.

Off the Cathedral plaza, leaving the cacophony of open-air cafes and street musicians, we climbed a dark staircase to take in wall-sized photos and videos of the mass murder of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, terror that the International Criminal Tribunal has declared a genocide. Survivors interviewed had a hard time imagining reconciliation with Serbian Bosnians with whom they still share a country. Like all the other exhibits, we were left with a greater understanding of humans’ capacity for cruelty, generosity, and resiliency.  What we did not understand is how to achieve Never Again—here, or anywhere else.   

A more complex story in Mostar  

Sarajevo museums leave Croats out. It simplifies the narrative, but does not tell the complex truth about ethnic conflict in BiH. Erasure is not possible in Mostar, a city 46 miles away and a two-hour train ride from Sarajevo, where Croats currently make up 55% of the population. Croats and Muslim Bosniaks live on separate sides of town. Of the 105,000 people in Mostar today, about 4,000 are Serb. The population of Mostar is down 20,000 people since 1991, and all of them are Serbs. 

Mostar had two wars. Bosnians and Croats fought each other until 1994. It was Croat troops who blew up the ancient Ottoman bridge that makes this town famous. The genocide museum in Mostar is better than those in Sarajevo at presenting this complication. However, the focus is still on the war crimes of the Serbs. They show haunting film footage of Orthodox priests blessing Serbian soldiers as they go off to slaughter Bosnian Muslims.

Museum testimony included the story of a comedian. Before 1991, he was in a performance troop that was Bosnian, Croat, and Serb. As the town began to fracture, they created routines they hoped would heal. Some ethnic shtick—absurdly funny before the war—lost its comedy as the fighting began.  He thought they would stay together, but they could not. Members took up arms against each other. 

Today, a competition of religions is laid bare, with new and rebuilt mosques and cathedrals reaching to the sky. There was a new cross atop the highest peak. At night, it lit up. To my subjective eye, it looked imperial, but the Cathedral, being rebuilt on one hillside, was such a beautiful sight, I tried to draw it.  

Crossing the internal border: East Sarajevo and Visegrad in the Republic of Srpska

Weeks of absorbing the 1990s crimes of Serbian militias began to cloud my ability to think politically rather than racially.  I felt compelled to cross the internal border now dividing Bosnian Croats and Muslims from Bosnian Serbs.

The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, home to the vast majority of Muslims and Croats still in BiH, is sandwiched between two ragged slices of the Republic of Srpska. Together, they are one country: Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The Republic of Srpska is within walking distance of Sarajevo. It is called East, or New Sarajevo. Like Minneapolis and St. Paul in the US, where I come from, there is no break in the urban landscape between the Sarajevos. Unlike the Twin Cities, in Minnesota, these municipalities are not fraternal. They are homes to two people who have violently severed ties. There is no bus service across their border.

They do share an international airport.  After seeing our loved one off at 6 A M, we walked the airport highway in search of breakfast. We did not realize we had crossed the dividing line until we saw this sign:

We had breakfast at a Serbian Orthodox Retreat Center. The menu was in Cyrillic. At 7 AM, we were the only customers. Other than the waiter, the only other people were two Srypska cops in the parking lot.

To get to Visegrad, we took a Sarajevo city bus to its final stop, walked four blocks, across the unmarked border, to the Srpska station. The Visegrad bus then drove back through Sarajevo, tripling the time it took for us to get to Visegrad. 

Emerging from a mountain tunnel, we could see the green Drina River snaking through the mountains. To the bemusement of our weary busmates, we stood up in the bus when the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge came into view. We had both read The Bridge on the Drina while in Montenegro. During the three days we spent in Visegrad, we did not tire of gazing, photographing, and crossing the span made famous by Ivo Andrić’s Nobel Prize-winning historical novel. 

Andrić is loved by Visegrad as a favorite son, and depicted by the current regime as a Serb nationalist, though, in fact, his parents were Croats. There are statues, murals, and plaques commemorating him. A grade school is named after him. His childhood classroom is a museum.

And then there is Andrićgrad. Built by a Serbian architect and filmmaker, it encompasses several blocks, including the location of the old police station that was an internment and torture center for Muslim neighbors in the early 90s. Nothing marks that infamy. Andrićgrad looks like a fake movie set.  The architect is hoping to produce a movie version of Bridge on the Drina there. It is antiseptic in a way that no Balkan place is or ever was. The Mosque he built is fake. The Church is a current place of worship. In it is a mural of people downing with arms outstretched: not some of the 3,000 Muslims who the Serb forces “disappeared” in 1992, nor Catholic nuns who were drowned by Serbian nationalists in 1941. The painting depicts the Serbian martyrs murdered in 1941 by Croatian fascists —Ustaše— who also threw their victims in the Drina.  

Visegrad was a diverse place before the fascists took over during World War II, with Serbs, Muslims, Croats, Jews, and Roma. During the Yugoslav period, the town was 2/3 Muslim, 1/3 Serb. Now it is 96% Serbian Orthodox. What happened to 13,500 Muslims in 1992? Most fled. Up to 3,000 were tortured to death, and an unknown number were thrown into the river. The remains of victims are still being uncovered. On May 31st, Muslim Bosniaks traveled to Visegrad to drop white and red roses into the Drina to memorialize their relatives.

We knew that Visegrad had resisted the Bosniak version of events. In 2014, they removed the word genocide from a memorial in the Visegrad cemetery. Still, we were shocked to see a banner across a main street, celebrating brave soldiers who fought for Serbian freedom in 1992. The current President of Srpska, Milorad Dodik, was in power in 2014. Recently, he has intensified his nationalist rhetoric. In February, he was convicted in a BiH court of secessionist activity and sentenced to one year in prison. The man has surrounded himself with international allies that include not only the Serbian regime but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu. We noted billboards of Dodik, surrounded by supporters, in Visegrad. And then, the man himself showed up. We missed him when he was posing for photos in Andrićgrad. Perhaps, when he stood next to the mosaic of himself, which looked to me like it depicted the President leading a game of tug-of-war in a bucolic setting, surrounded by lovely young women, flowers, and fruit trees. The artist’s symbolism is slightly different.

 

The Dodik mosaic is over the movie theater, adjacent to another mosaic in contrasting browns and greys depicting Gavrilo Princip and his comrades, who shot  Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Isabella, beginning a cascade of events that precipitated World War I. The Serbian Bosnians ignore Princip’s anarchism and internationalism and embrace him as not only an anti-imperialist but as a Serb nationalist. There are paintings of him for sale in art galleries, and t-shirts, mugs, and refrigerator magnets in souvenir shops, stamped with his soulful, forever-young face.

(Later, we visited Princip Park in East Sarajevo. It is a children’s playground, surrounded by high-rises. A statue of Gavrilo looks especially young. At an informational memorial plaque, we learned that he walked from Sarajevo to Belgrade to attend school, and that at 19, he was too young under Austro-Hungarian law to receive the death penalty.)

On our last morning in Visegrad, we sat by our window and watched a crane operator erect a giant Srpska flag on the other side of the river.  We had a couple of hours between checkout time and the bus, so we walked across the bridge and had lunch. From our cafe spot, we had a beautiful view of the water and bridge, but I was watching a group of gangly tweenagers with matching team T-shirts, eating a post-game meal.  

We left the restaurant and walked to a bench near the bridge and the newly erected flag to wait for our bus. A motorcade halted in front of us.  President Milorad Dodik and his entourage emerged, walked to the bridge, took a photo, and rushed back to their air-conditioned cars.

Konjic complicates the story.  

We also visited Konjic, a small river town halfway between Mostar and Sarajevo, seeking the peace of a rural river town. We found peace—walking the Neratva River, sitting in cafes with a view of Stara Ćruprija (Old Bridge), sipping Turkish coffee, and contemplating new pieces to the Bosnian puzzle.

The story of how the Nazi’s bombed the bridge in 1945 and the Turks reconstructed it in 2006 was told in a photo exhibit at the Konjic Museum. It was a cool place, right on the river with some prehistoric artifacts and a photo exhibit that covers the late 19th and most of the 20th century. The 1990s wars, however, were absent. It was curious, since everywhere else in the Federation of BiH, the post-Yugoslav war usurped all other historical chapters. Dave asked the docent what happened here.

The docent said simply, “Many were killed.” 

I had to look at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia website to find out that between April and December 1992, Muslim and Croat forces detained hundreds of local Serbs in the Konjic region, “including women and the elderly. Detainees were murdered, tortured, sexually assaulted, and beaten….” Three men: Zdravko Mucić, Hazim Delić and Esad Landžo, were found “guilty of grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and sentenced to nine,18 and 15 years’ imprisonment, respectively.”

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What about Tito? Erasing complicated history

There is a sentence people often repeat to explain the post-Yugoslav wars: that Tito repressed ethnic rivalries and then, like a pressure cooker, they exploded when the regime fell. To know if that is true, we need the same kind of detailed storytelling about times before and during the Tito era, as now exists for the 1990s wars.  Konjig was the only place we visited where the Tito years were not erased from their museum. The era was told in photographs, including a series of Tito’s visits to the town over the years. 

The National History Museum in Sarajevo was once a vehicle for telling the story of the Communist era from Tito’s perspective. Now the Tito-era exhibits are in the basement, where you can touch dusty abandoned newsletters. A statue of Tito lies on its back in their courtyard. Tito-era photos decorate the popular Tito Coffee Shop and Bar next door. (Perhaps created for that purpose?) There is still an exhibit on World War II, but the primary focus of the museum is now the 1990s war, not anchored to before or after.

When I asked the docent what happened to past exhibits, he handed me a large hardback with essays by museum staff across Europe struggling with how to tell the story of the Partisans who fought the Nazis. It was a new book, but he was giving it to me. I appreciated the essays on how institutions struggle with drastic changes in political eras, the funding sources that come and go with those changes, while trying to maintain the integrity of their work as history museums.

There is a tiny private Tito Museum in Sarajevo, filled with the kinds of 1950s and 60s kitsch that might be found in a small-town US museum: kitchen appliances, food items, cleaning materials, and photos of cars, including the ubiquitous Yugo. There is also a grainy video on Tito as the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. Worker management and decentralized government were his signature policies, while maintaining himself as a singular strongman.

We learned of Tito’s pivot away from Stalin. For decades, Tito received funding from both the US and the USSR, as they competed for his allegiance. Economically, this was a good deal. But Yugoslavia was also sandwiched between two hostile nuclear powers. To allay his fears of apocalypse, Tito built a fortress.

Of course, he didn’t build it. Workers—a whole army of them, over  25 years—built a nuclear bunker outside of Konjic, meant to house Tito, his family, and a 300-person entourage for six months in the event of a nuclear war. It cost $4.5 billion. Invisible from the outside, it is set into the side of a mountain, so that without descending, it is 200 feet underground at its farthest reach. Our tour whisked through, past poignant art exhibits I wanted to study. Many focused on the futility of the nuclear arms race and war in general.

One of the exhibits inside Tito’s bunker was a half-dozen identical photos of Tito’s face: each with a different lighting. He looked demonic, angelic, confused, concerned, dazed, and invisible. The artist wanted to symbolize the diverse ways people view him today. The same point can be made about the 1990s wars. That does not mean that we should not strive for an overarching understanding. 

The opposing narratives in Bosnia and Republika Srpska are a dead end for young people, promoting the racist idea that people who were enriched by each other’s presence for eons are suddenly and henceforth incompatible. They need a comprehensive understanding, not a nationalist story. That means talking about the economic devastation that all people in Bosnia were under. After the fall of Titoism and the Soviet Union, there were months of 300% inflation. What happens when you and your neighbors suddenly can’t put food on the table or pay the rent?  And they need to examine the role of powerful outside actors who incited the wars, and control the peace.

Bosnia and Herzegovina in a global context. 

Can different ethnic groups and /or religions live together in equality, peace, and mutual respect? The Dayton Peace Accord said NO — and divided up the country into ethnic enclaves, creating an absurd and constipated political system. The Federations of BiH and Srpska each have their presidents. In addition, the nation of BiH has three Presidents, each representing an ethnic group! If you don’t belong to one of those three ethnic/religious groups, you can’t run for office. No Roma, no Jews. There is a European Viceroy (currently German) who has veto power over all the BiH elected officials. Behind the scenes, the EU, NATO, the United States, as well as Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, and Turkey, all have influence. Imagine trying to navigate that tangled mess to get a railroad built between Sarajevo and Belgrade that would facilitate peacebuilding and regional economic well-being. 

The Bosnian Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom notes that no peace groups or grassroots organizations were involved in the Dayton Accords—and no women. The men met in Ohio, on a US military base. After the Accords, NATO invaded with 60,000 troops to enforce the Agreement. Since the Accords, Europe has been promising to envelop countries that were formerly part of the Soviet sphere into the EU. In 2025, that has yet to happen—not for BiH,  Albania, or Kosovo. Yet, the EU continues to claim that membership is just around the corner. Why? Is it because these nationalist European countries do not want too many low-income Muslims as equal citizens? Today, they are a ready source of cheap labor. They enter the EU as second-class people, migrant workers. 

During our time in BiH, we experienced peace and joy. The world did not. 

When our adult child visited, we climbed one of the mountains surrounding Sarajevo,  rounding a corner and finding just the right cafe with a view of the entire valley. We participated in a joyful Pride march, which began at the National Museum (the Tito coffee shop hung a Trans flag) and marched through the Austro-Hungarian center of town. We were blessed to be in Sarajevo on Eid. The city celebrated with a folk/rock concert at the foot of the Mosque in the old town.

We experienced peace, but the world did not. In our hometown of Minneapolis, tanks filled the streets as troops, ICE (Immigration Customs and Enforcement) agents, and Minneapolis cops worked together to raid a Latino business center a mile from our former home. I thought about how terrified people would be in Sarajevo if military tanks and unmarked militias in masks raided a crowded shopping area. The Trump administration sent 2000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into LA to quell protests against ICE conducting raids at schools, houses of worship, and workplaces. It built camps on the US border that mimic those in Bosnia in 1992.  

As we took in the history of what happened in Bosnia 30 years ago, we kept on saying to each other, IN GAZA, RIGHT NOW, IT IS WORSE. More deaths, more cruelty, more targeting of international aid workers and journalists, more targeting of non-combatants: babies, children, women, old people, more destruction of infrastructure, more wanton aiding and abetting by global powers great and small, but most of all our country, the United States. We were grateful to have the opportunity to participate in a March for Palestine, which began in the heart of the Ottoman Old Town, paused for a rally in front of the Cathedral, and ended at the perpetual flame for those who fought the Nazis during World War II.

While we were in BiH, a Tribunal on the Gaza Genocide was conducted in Sarajevo. The forum of academics, legal experts, and human rights advocates issued the Sarejevo Declaration. They found that, yes, Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The international community must take action to stop it and hold the perpetrators responsible for their crimes. 

While we were in Sarajevo, Israel bombed Iran, and then the United States joined in. The Iranian Embassy in Sarajevo had a welcome center. On the day after the US bombed Tehran, a small group was doing calligraphy around a table.

I kept walking by there, as if my presence at their door could stop a bomb. I kept thinking about this film footage from Mostar of an old man. I don’t remember his ethnicity. Perhaps he had dementia. In the middle of a battle, he left his home with a bag of breadcrumbs to feed the pigeons. He was shot. The pigeons surrounded his dead body, eating the rest of the gift he had brought them. For me, his fate was not evidence of “war crimes” but the criminality of war itself. Certainly, there are men like him in Tehran.

Concluding thoughts: 

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia focused on individuals with the specific purpose of ” protecting entire communities from being labeled ‘collectively responsible.'” For that to happen, every entity that teaches and makes policy needs to embrace this goal. This goes for all of us everywhere, working toward Never Again for Anyone. We humans need to learn about ethnic/religious/racial violence, removed from ethnicity, religion, and race. We need to examine the human tendency to divide and conquer as a universal thing, not something that belongs to particular groups. Otherwise, we are in danger of reifying and repeating the very thing we abhor.  When they talk about race, ethnicity, and/or religion, we must ask about power, class, and empire.

The alternative to using nationalist histories to build pride is to tell stories of solidarity. 

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The history of this region is visible in architecture. The red tiled roofs, stone arch bridges and old mosques of the Ottoman period, grand castle-like structures of the Austrio-Hungarian period, and the “brutalist cement apartment complexes of the Tito era. The 1990s war period left bullet holes in all of them. Only the post-1995, glass and steel, multi-colored apartment buildings are without them. The people of BiH deserve a history, like that told in their architecture: layered, without erasure.

Bosnian artists lead the way.  Sevdah, for example, is a Bosnian music genre that borrows from every culture that touched this land.  It is ancient and forward-looking. Even the most painful eras had something to offer this tradition. The musicians break borders and build bridges with every tune. Visiting the Sevdah Museum and listening to music coming from the bar below my Sarajevo apartment deepened my affection for this culturally rich community with its old bridges, red roofs, grey high-rises, and green mountains. 

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Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a theater for our theories. It is not an economic or military playground for International powers. It is a home of diverse people trying to raise the next generation. The kids posing for graduation photos in front of the Sarejovo Cathedral and the teenagers eating a post-game meal in Visegrad deserve a future unchained from the terror of their parents. When we refuse to racialize people, we give children a chance. The people of this region have centuries of experience building multicultural bridges.    “The Power,”  Bosnian WILPF reminds us, “lies with the people.”

 

This essay about a six-week visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina in May/June 2025, is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering if/how memory can liberate the present.