The siege of Sarajevo belongs to a different kind of warfare that we had not known in Europe before. It was about constant abuse through starvation and violence towards civilians, primarily killing, by means of shelling and snipers.
The previous idea of war understood a code in which there were two opposing armies. We also knew of war in which the aim was to kill civilians through military means. But our collective understanding of war always had a clash of armies in the foreground.
That changed in some way in Sarajevo. What could be seen from the outside was the constant suffering of nameless civilians – a constant image of abused and murdered civilians. Then something changed.
In Sarajevo, there was a strong need for normality, for a life in which some form of elementary dignity was preserved. As a result, the cultural project that emerged, the need for artists and writers to describe their reality through creative work, was significantly strengthened already in the first year of the siege. Thanks to the existence of some new institutions, created during the war, the image of our reality in the eyes of people around the world changed.
SaGa film production company made films that were released very quickly abroad, which people had the opportunity to see. I remember, sometime in 1993, when I was working at independent radio station Zid (The Wall), we had a project featuring shows in which people from SaGa described their new wartime work, as well as those from Obala Art Centar, which at the time was a very agile cultural institution.
One morning, film director Srdjan Vuletic appeared, happy because Werner Herzog had seen his short film Palio Sam Noge (“I Burned My Legs”) and was impressed, after which he felt the need to send a gift to the director. So a watch that Herzog had prepared for Vuletic arrived in Sarajevo.
Performance of the ballet ‘Bolero’ at Dom Mladih in Sarajevo. Photo: Milomir Kovacevic.
Our texts were reaching audiences abroad and being published in respected magazines. In that need for normality, theatres worked on new plays and the Sarajevo War Theatre was launched, which had its own permanent repertoire.
Obala, on the other hand, was doing various things, from art exhibitions to gathering an entire group of musicians who, in a short time, created perhaps the most interesting rock scene in Sarajevo in its history.
This generated a kind of interest among artists in the world: during their European tour, the band U2 was directly involved in wartime Sarajevo and during their concerts they talked to local artists. In this way, a different image of the city was transmitted to the world. Interest outside Bosnia grew, especially among artists, about what was happening in Sarajevo, and a wave of important artists from the world came to the city. The overall cultural project present in the city began to grow rapidly.
Zoran Becic in the play ‘Mother’ by director Sulejman Kupusovic at the Kamerni Teatar. Photo: Milomir Kovacevic.
A big thing was American writer Susan Sontag coming to the city; she spent months there and worked with Sarajevo actors. After her, important American artists came, such as Joan Baez. French artists followed after Francis Bueb arrived; it became a kind of station to which they were directed. An important French director at that time, Leos Carax, also spent some time in the city. Writers and philosophers also started to arrive. Pascal Bruckner was among them.
They participated in joint projects with local artists. I remember French artist Christian Boltanski’s wonderful exhibition on the roof of the building where the Scena (Stage) was located.
I also remember the Czech, Jan Urban. Vaclav Havel’s first collaborator in the Velvet Revolution, was another frequent visitor. Once he came up with the idea for artists from all over the world, hundreds of thousands of them, to literally come and free the city from the siege.
The Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra plays a New Year’s concert to welcome 1995. Photo: Milomir Kovacevic.
Sarajevo’s cultural project had great strength, and was one of the reasons why Sarajevo survived the siege. After all, it was about a European city that, viewed from the perspective of Western policies, was left at the mercy of fate – four years of abuse, which was eventually brought to an end. A similar abandonment could not have happened so easily to another city in Europe.
Certainly, the importance of the cultural project determined the fate of the city in a special way. That’s how we felt during the siege; one of the important reasons for the survival of Sarajevo was precisely the constant presence of the war in the public media around the world. And the foreign journalists who stayed here, quickly understanding what was happening, devotedly reported all the cultural events from Sarajevo.
The strong need for normality spoke through the works of people who lived in Sarajevo. Interestingly, after the war ended, a need for oblivion and amnesia appeared, which was probably projected from the outside but also from the inside, arising from a need for the so-called warring sides to reconcile and to return the situation in Bosnia to some kind of normality.
Artist Afram Ramic at his exhibition at the Collegium Artisticum gallery in 1994. Photo: Milomir Kovacevic.
The 20th century, the end of a millennium, was marked by the demolition of the Vijecnica, the city library and the Oriental Institute, by shells fired from Mt Trebevic above Sarajevo, which had one clear goal, the destruction of the city’s memory. They were never completely restored, which is a consequence of that need to forget. It is a sad fact that the books have not been returned to the Vijecnica. The process of forgetting over the past 30 or more years has been extremely strong.
