Post-War Identification. Torsten Kolind
15 present the most important categories of identities which my informants employ when identifying themselves: a strong local patriotic attachment that includes all respectable citizens of Stolac; an ideal of tolerance and inter-ethnic coexistence; shifting attachments to the discursive construct of Europe-Balkan; and the ‘role of the victim.’ The first three resist the nationalist thinking to various degrees. For my informants, their Muslim identity is of utmost importance; however, the content of this identity relates not to nationalist or religious elements, but to values stressing interethnic respect and coexistence. Only in the ‘role of the victim’ have I found elements of an antagonist, essentialist ethnic identity.
The field
In a tragic but also important way, Bosnia Herzegovina serves as a contemporary example of how war and war-related violence is connected to processes of identification. The war in Bosnia Herzegovina consisted of several conflicts. One of them took place between the Croats and the Muslims in Herzegovina, and it is this somewhat neglected war I look into. I choose Stolac as a field site as the UN and OHR (Office of High Representatives) had a pilot project here encouraging Muslims and Serbs to return. A local employee in the DRC (Danish Refugee Centre) helped set me up in Stolac with some of his friends; here I rented a separate room on the lower floor of their house. In the beginning, I ate alone and did not interfere very much in my landlords’ lives. I did not want to trouble them too much, and they left me alone so I could concentrate on my research. Soon, however, our formal ways of interacting changed. I had my meals in their house, we interacted a great deal, and I came to have a very relaxed relationship with the family (children, brothers and parent), several of their friends, and their home in general. I listened to their tragic stories and their present problems, and they comforted me when I missed my wife and children in Denmark. I conducted fieldwork from the middle of September 2000 to the middle of April 2001, taking a two-week break around Christmas to recuperate (the sad and depressing life and fate of my informants having taxed my energy) and for preliminary reflections on my data. My relatively short period of fieldwork could not fully dissolve my role as an outsider, but in the end I did not think of myself as a total stranger. My fieldwork in Stolac was in a way rather traditional, but conducted in an untraditional situation. I participated in as many different situations as possible and interacted with as many people as I could. Some I only met or talked to once or twice, others I interacted with on a regular basis. As Stolac is in some respects a small town, I soon became acquainted with a lot of people, old and young, and heard stories about even more. Naturally, my data is marked by my role as an interested, educated, male, white Westerner. However, I never found that such roles excluded me from participating in any situations. And though much of my data is affected by, and some even came about as a result of, these roles, I also feel that I engaged in various situations where I could observe and listen or interact in a relatively relaxed manner without playing the lead: listening to people educate their children, watching television with informants, sitting in the café, drinking with some of my informants, walking around town talking with informants, participating in funerals, visiting people informally and so on.
I had five key informants with whom I interacted on daily basis:
– A schoolteacher in the mid-thirties. He lived with his wife, their small children and his parents. Like many of my informants, he was traumatised by his stay in a prison camp. He often told me how episodes from that stay troubled his sleep at night. Despite these tough memories, he spent a lot of energy trying to focus on positive aspects of the present, and he felt a heavy responsibility, due to his role as teacher and father, to refrain from instilling hate in the younger generation. This educational function, however, sometimes collided with the bitterness and anger which he also bore.
– A couple in their fifties. They lived with their grown-up sons. The husband was lucky to have work, which he conscientiously carried out. They had a nice house. All their furniture however had been stolen, and the house had been vandalised during the war. The couple was only slowly putting the house in order. As they sometimes said, they simply lacked the energy. The couple was bitter and often depressed, and they loved to talk about the past when they had experienced prosperity and happiness. They worried a lot about their children’s future, as they feared there were only very few opportunities for them.
– A young man in his mid-twenties. He studied at the faculty in Mostar – a hard-working student. He lived with his parents and was an indispensable workforce in the home. He was very determined about asserting the future in a positive way. After four months of imprisonment in a Croatian-run prison camp he had been living abroad for four years, where he had been building up a life, and had a job and friends. Then voluntarily he had returned to Stolac. Living in Stolac, therefore, was for him a conscious choice and he wanted it to be successful. In contrast to his friends of the same age, he was interested in politics. And he believed, at least to a point, that a change on the political level away from nationalist politics was possible and could even improve ordinary people’s situation and inter-ethnic relations in general.
– An old lady around seventy years old. She was living with her daughter. Although I regarded her as generally positive, she was also often very sad. She lamented her own situation: Stolac, the once so beautiful city where she had grown up, was now nothing but ruins. Most of all, though, she missed her son and her grandchildren. They were now living abroad and contact was rare. All her life she had been living with ethnic differences as a natural part of life, and she simply could not comprehend the present ethnic animosity in Bosnia Herzegovina, let alone Stolac.
An important part of my data stems from interviews. Some of the interviews only had one interviewee, but most of them were conducted in people’s homes with much of the family and often also some friends present. The interviews were loosely structured. Normally, I introduced topics which I had found to be relevant when doing participant observation, and which helped steer the conversation toward subject matters I found important; but just as often the discussion took unanticipated detours, some of which became subjects for further conversations and interviews with other informants. In sum, I conducted twenty-eight taped interviews lasting on average one and a half to three hours. Often after I had turned off the tape recorder, people kept talking for an additional thirty minutes to two hours. I conducted the majority of the interviews with the same assistant, who vouched for me since I did not know all of the interviewees beforehand. In Denmark, I had taught myself Serbo-Croatian, or Bosnian, as Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina call it today. And during at least the last three and a half months (the period when I also conducted the interviews), I felt I had an adequate command of the language. However, when I talked to people or overheard conversations, several shades of meaning got lost that were doubtless important. I therefore translated and transcribed all my interviews in Stolac into Danish with the help of an informant who spoke Danish almost fluently (he had spent four years in Denmark as a refugee). My interviews and participant observation therefore contributed to each other in various ways. Throughout the book I quote from both taped interviews and conversations written down post factum. I do not always point out whether I am dealing with the one or the other, only mentioning it when I feel it is significant. All the names of my informants are pseudonyms; however, the same pseudonyms are used consistently for the same persons, allowing the reader (at least to some degree) to get to know the different informants. On a few occasions, however, I have used two different pseudonyms for the same person, simply in order to prevent a potential identification. Only rarely do I offer individual characterisations of or personal information about my informants. I know it is detrimental to my presentation; however, the anonymity of my informants takes first priority.
My study has one great bias. Only on a few occasions did I talk to or otherwise interact with Croat citizens of Stolac. Some of my informants encouraged me to do so; however, I did not feel I could entertain credibility among either the Muslims or the Croats by pursuing such a strategy, and I did not have sufficient time to divide up my fieldwork. As a result, my analysis deals with the point of view of the Muslims of Stolac alone.
In addition to my fieldwork in Stolac, I also did research among Bosnians living in Denmark. I carried out ten unstructured interviews with Bosnians who had been granted residence permits. And for three months I visited Bosnians living in a camp for asylum applicants on a regular basis. I have not worked systematically with the data collected through