Post-War Identification. Torsten Kolind
Crimes in Stolac Municipality for a thorough statement of the destruction of historic monuments in Stolac. The document is also on the Internet: http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/stolac/CrimesSt.pdf
9 Ustashe is closely connected to violent Croat nationalist and fascist policy.
Introduction
The war in former Yugoslavia – mainly Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina – and the fierceness with which it was carried out is probably still remembered by most Europeans. For many, this war inside Europe destroyed the feeling of living in a peaceful region, a feeling built upon a common European commitment to not letting the Second World War repeat itself: Never again! Some, though, succeeded in upholding the idea of everlasting European peace by ascribing the war and violence in former Yugoslavia to an endemic Balkan mentality: the Other within.
The war is now over, at least it officially ended with the Dayton agreement on 14 December 1995, and the people of the region are now trying to piece together a life – pieces consisting of war-related traumas, nationalist propaganda, ruined economies, disappointment, memories of pre-war life and so on. This book focuses on this puzzle of post-war life among the Muslim population of Stolac, a small town in Bosnia Herzegovina. More specifically, I will concentrate on how in everyday practices and narratives the Muslims of Stolac resist the ethnonationalist discourse that has invaded so many aspects of both public and private life throughout the last two decades. Their resistance is seldom outspoken, consciously articulated or organised; rather it consists of a steady insistence on not using ethnic or national categories and stereotypes when identifying themselves and others. And it exists in a hope for future inter-ethnic coexistence. I term this resistance counterdiscourse.
Many books and articles dealing with the war and pre-war period in former Yugoslavia have been published in the last fifteen years, and nearly all of these have analysed the role of nationalism. Some maintain that nationalist or ethnic tensions in former Yugoslavia ignited the war; others have demonstrated how such tensions were produced throughout the war and pre-war period to legitimise a fight for power. Hardly any, however, have focused on how ordinary people trying to hold on to everyday life have related to the discourses of nationalism outside the public sphere.1 In this book I maintain this ethnographic focus; and, as my results illustrate, nationalist policy and ethnic identity and stereotypes in the light of the everyday life of the Muslims of Stolac come to mean something else and also something less, as they have to live with the consequences of ethnic hatred in a much more direct way. My analysis thus partly contradicts structuralist theories of violence, claiming that violence results in the creation of unambiguous and clear-cut identities. By relating such an argument to the way in which actual victims of violence react to the creation of unambiguous identities, one sees that complexity, flexibility and inconsistent categories are what mark post-war/post-violence society.
Because the complex question of ethnicity and nationality in former Yugoslavian republics is so central for understanding both war and post-war life, I shall provide a short explanation:
1) In the former Yugoslavia, everyone had a Yugoslav citizenship.
2) In the former Yugoslavia, one could choose a national identity from the options given by the state, for example on census forms. However, the English term ‘national identity’ or ‘nation’ does not fully cover the term used in former Yugoslavia: narod. In Danish, my own language, there is a more or less equivalent term: folk (or in German volk). The national identities most relevant for this study are: Croat, Serb, Muslim and Yugoslav.
3) In former Yugoslavia, one had an ethnic or ethnoreligious identity (nacija). I use the terms interchangeably. This identity was more or less ‘inherited’ from one’s parents. Though religious terms are used to designate ethnic identity, one cannot translate nacija as religious identity. In my study, I will be referring to the following ethnic or ethnoreligious identities: Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Muslim. And in general (but not always) Croats are Catholics, Serbs are Orthodox Christians, and Muslims are Muslims.
However, things are and were not as clear-cut as the above divisions indicate. In the book, I do not use the terms ‘national identity’ (narod) and ‘ethnic identity’ (nacija), and nationalism and ethnicisation in an entirely consistent and clearcut manner. In the first place, my informants did not do this either, and in the second place the major aim of nationalist policy was to conjoin the two identities, so that the emotionally deep ethnoreligious identity could strengthen the more arbitrary national identity. This nationalist project did succeed up to a point: when my informants – who are Muslims – referred to a Muslim identity, it was not always obvious whether they were referring to ethnic (nacija) or national identity (narod); and often, it was my sense that they were not certain either. It is necessary to add a further remark on terminology. A ‘Bosnian’ (bosanac) is someone coming from Bosnia Herzegovina no matter what his ethnic affiliation. ‘Bosniak’ (bošnjak) means Bosnian Muslim. However, the terms however have a disputed history, see Chapter 10.
The structure of the book
Part I, Framing the question, consists of the Prologue, with factual information about war and post-war episodes in the Stolac area. Chapter 1 presents a thorough reading of contemporary anthropological perspectives on war and warrelated violence, and my own research is placed in relation to this. In Chapter 2, I depict the way in which my informants’ world has been unmade: primarily through ontological insecurity, the breakdown of mental categories, moral decay, and an all-pervading feeling of loss. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical tools for analysing identification, discourse and counterdiscourse; the delicate balance is to establish the concept of counterdiscourse solidly enough for it to function as an analytical tool, and porously enough to avoid doing violence to the ambiguities of real life.
Part II, Who are they, the ones who did this to us? is about how the Muslims of Stolac identify possible Others when accounting for the war as well as for their present hopeless situation. My main argument is that their identifications of the Others resist the ethnicisation that came to dominate public life in former Yugoslavia and in the seceding nations. Chapter 4, therefore, outlines the emergence of this national thinking in former Yugoslavia, showing how it is rooted in the post-Second-World-War politics of Tito, but exploded throughout the 1980s as a way to gain power. Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 present the most important categories of identity which my informants employ when identifying the guilty party: immoral politics; decent and indecent people; un-cultured persons, and, lastly, a complex range of different ways of categorising Croats (my informants’ main ethnic Other). All identifications avoid ethnifying the war and are part of the Muslims’ counterdiscourse.
Part III, Who are we, since this was done to us? deals with my informants’ identification of themselves as Muslims, an identity that has become increasingly important. Pre-war embedded practices of identification no longer suffice, so new and more conscious values have to be attached to their ethnoreligious identity. When identifying Muslimness, my informants avoid drawing upon the national and religious values promoted especially by Bosnian Muslim political elite throughout the war. Chapter 9, which should be read in continuation of Chapter 4, accounts for the emergence of this specific Bosnian Muslim national religious identity; and I argue that it came late, was contradictory, and can to some extent be seen as an elite project. In Chapter 10, I outline the features of pre-war processes of everyday Bosnian Muslim ethnoreligious identification. I find it reasonable to conclude that this identification was very important, but also embedded in everyday life and characterised by respectful means of inter-ethnic interaction. This insight is important later when I demonstrate how my informants have objectified elements of such pre-war habitual patterns of inter-ethnic interaction today, and when I estimate the changes that the war has created in matters of identification. Chapter 11 illustrates how national and religious identification is only of minor importance to the Muslims of Stolac.