Sarajevo Under Siege offers a richly detailed account of the lived
experiences of ordinary people in this multicultural city between 1992
and 1996, during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Moving beyond the
shelling, snipers, and shortages, it documents the coping strategies
people adopted and the creativity with which they responded to desperate
circumstances.
Ivana Maček, an anthropologist who grew up in the former Yugoslavia,
argues that the division of Bosnians into antagonistic ethnonational
groups was the result rather than the cause of the war, a view that was
not only generally assumed by Americans and Western Europeans but also
deliberately promoted by Serb, Croat, and Muslim nationalist
politicians. Nationalist political leaders appealed to ethnoreligious
loyalties and sowed mistrust between people who had previously coexisted
peacefully in Sarajevo. Normality dissolved and relationships were
reconstructed as individuals tried to ascertain who could be trusted.
Over time, this ethnography shows, Sarajevans shifted from the shock
they felt as civilians in a city under siege into a soldier way of
thinking, siding with one group and blaming others for the war.
Eventually, they became disillusioned with these simple rationales for
suffering and adopted a deserter stance, trying to take moral
responsibility for their own choices in spite of their powerless
position. The coexistence of these contradictory views reflects the
confusion Sarajevans felt in the midst of a chaotic war.
Maček respects the subjectivity of her informants and gives Sarajevans'
own words a dignity that is not always accorded the viewpoints of
ordinary citizens. Combining scholarship on political violence with
firsthand observation and telling insights, this book is of vital
importance to people who seek to understand the dynamics of armed
conflict along ethnonational lines both within and beyond Europe.
