Larisa Kurtovi!

The Paradoxes of Wartime Freedom: Alternative Culture during the Siege of Sarajevo1

The 19921995 siege of Sarajevo remains etched in memory as a time of brutal shelling, everyday struggles for survival, and systematic destruction of the citys cultural heritage. Yet amidst this devastation, the Bosnia and Herzegovinian capital simultaneously witnessed a flowering of various artistic enterprises and alternative cultural scenes. It is estimated that during the siege, some 182 theatre productions, 170 exhibits, and 48 concerts came to life in Sarajevo.2 Most of these initiatives were too small and too improvised to leave behind a robust material record. While most built upon the citys existing social geographies and professional relationships, some projects emerged out of collaborations of local artists with international visitors3 and cultural organisations outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A few ambitious programmes, such as the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF), became notable postwar success stories.4 Sarajevos wartime art remains one of its most recognisable brands, as well as a precious object of nostalgia that reminds of the worst and the best of times. This chapter examines the arena of cultural production in besieged Sarajevo as an unorthodox site of civic engagement, which in its emphasis on music and arts and the concomitant refusal of nationalist frames of reference, emerged as a unique, complicated and largely indirect site of political conten1 I would like to thank Marina Anti!, Nina Blagojevi!, Bojan Had"ihalilovi! and Aida Kalender for agreeing to be interviewed and generously giving up their time, as well as to Bojan Bili!, Haris Pa#ovi! and Bruno Lovri! for the assistance in gathering other resources for this chapter. Emir Imamovi!, Grad u kojem je sve bilo mogu!e, Slobodna Dalmacija, 11 April 2012, Available at: <http://slobodnadalmacija.hr/Arterija/tabid/247/articleType/ArticleView/ar ticleId/170612/Default.aspx> (Accessed 14 August 2012). Among renowned quests to the besieged Sarajevo are Susan Sontag, Joan Baez, BernardHenri Lvy, and Michael Ignatieff. Sontag spent perhaps the most time in the city, collaborating with Haris Pa#ovi! and directing in 1993 an adaptation of Becketts Waiting for Godot at Sarajevos Youth Theatre. See Susan Sontag, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, Performing Arts Journal, 16 (1994) 2, pp. 87106. Although Sarajevans in general praised such visits, believing in the power of these stars advocacy, most people also understood that many foreigners used the plight of Sarajevo for self-promotion. For a less than forgiving view of Sontags directorial debut in Sarajevo, see Kevin Myers, I Wish I had Kicked Susan Sontag, The Telegraph, (2005). Available at: <www.telegraph.co.uk/ comment/personal-view/3613939/I-wish-I-had-kicked-Susan-Sontag.html> (Accessed 21 April 2012). The first SFF took place in October 1993 under the title Beyond the End of the World [Poslije kraja svijeta], as an offshoot of the theatre festival MESS.

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tion. The engineers and participants of the three projects examined in this study did not necessarily see their work as pre-eminently political, even though their practices and message directly challenged the growing dominance of nationalism. My analysis foregrounds the seeming non-political nature and ambiguous ideological character of their initiatives, arguing that they cannot be understood through the conventional tropes of civil society, social movements or even anti-war activism. Their power lay in their ability to cultivate a set of sensibilities, dispositions and structures of feeling, said to be constitutive of Sarajevos self-professed cosmopolitan identity and in radical opposition to the agenda of nationalists. These dispositions, encoded in aesthetic preferences, tastes and social norms, formed a core of a collective subjectivity that underlined a way of life, stretching outside of any particular political or even anti-war programme. By bringing into focus such unofficial and informal sites of contention, this chapter seeks to broaden the understanding of the variety of means through which alternative political imaginaries were kept alive during the 1990s.5 In line with the rest of this volume, it also seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature on anti-nationalist initiatives in the former Yugoslavia, first by adding a much needed empirically-grounded perspective from Bosnia and Herzegovina,6 and secondly, by focusing on artists and cultural producers rather than activists.7 The analysis presented here draws inspiration from Bourdieus critical insights into the historico-political underpinnings of pro-

For an insightful perspective on the political dimensions of alternative culture during the 1990s in Serbia, see Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). This chapter is also a contribution to studies of everyday life under siege in Sarajevo. Despite the vast literature on other aspects of the Bosnian war, empirically grounded studies of predicaments of civilians remain relatively few. Ivana Ma$eks Sarajevo Under Siege (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) is, to my knowledge, the only ethnography researched during the war. With the notable exception of the archive of FAMA documentation centre in Sarajevo, most quotidian accounts of the war come in the form of diaries and letters, reports and reflections of journalists and aid workers, and news articles. For exemplary writing on everyday wartime life, see Kemal Kurspahi!, Letters from the War (Sarajevo: Ideje, 1992); Zlatko Dizdarevi!, Sarajevo: A War Journal (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1993) and Barbara Demick, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1996). Anti-nationalist contention has mostly been studied from the perspective of feminist, antiwar, aid and documentation initiatives from the 1990s. While many activists in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia (and to lesser extent, also Bosnia and Herzegovina), also produced writings about their work, helpful summarising analyses can be found in Ana Devi!, Anti-War Initiatives and the Un-Making of Civic Identities in the Former Yugoslav Republics, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10 (1997) 2, pp. 12756, and Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: Etnografija otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2005). Jansens insightful study focuses on Croatia and Serbia, where anti-war activists often had to advocate against nationalism within their own surroundings and ethnic groups. As this chapter shows, the situation was initially different in Sarajevo, where ethnically diverse groups of cultural producers saw themselves as primarily fighting both real and imagined outsiders.

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cesses of cultural production and consumption.8 I examine the work of Sarajevos artists and media producers not as proof of the trans-historical superiority of art (as it has sometimes been represented), but as product of specific socio-political conditions and a situated symbolic economy. On the pages that follow, I trace the founding of the independent radio station ZID [The Wall], which saw as its mission, the preservation of the civic spirit and urban culture of Sarajevo; the evolution of the local music scene, perhaps best exemplified by the 1995 Rock under the Siege concert, and the work of designer group Trio which produced a series of now wellknown postcards and posters about Sarajevos siege.9 Among many potentially worthwhile case studies, I chose these three initiatives because they are widely recognised as exemplary of the creative energies unleashed during the war. They also best illuminate the efforts of Sarajevos cultural producers to speak to audiences beyond the borders of their besieged city. I draw on interviews conducted with participants of these initiatives, as well as secondary reports, newspaper and magazine articles, and other textual materials.10 My arguments are also informed by my long-term ethnographic research in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and my unique position as a Sarajevo-born, US-trained anthropologist who came of age during the siege (though was still too young at the time to fully appreciate this underground scene). The analysis that follows stems out of the desire to trouble beloved mythologies and the moralising narratives, which have come to replace the rich, humorous and often self-effacing subjective accounts of the siege. My focus lies with specific practices that shaped wartime cultural production; in an effort to portray them, I also highlight the tensions and paradoxes that marked that time.11 The chapters title alludes to such contradictions. In 1992, the collapse of the old cultural institutions and media producers (many of which were simply too big to continue operating in this precarious new situation), afforded the opportunity for the emergence of new, smaller and independent initiatives and organisations.12 Moreover, despite the politically charged
8 9 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Boston: Harvard University Press), 1984. I originally planned to also include wartime theatre in Sarajevo, but in the end, I did not have the adequate space to delve into the complexities of this arena, where multiple actors and projects would have been worth analysing. For first-hand accounts of this scene, see Haris Pa#ovi!, City the Engaged (2009). Available at: <http://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/ iwp.uiowa.edu/files/Pasovic_Haris_CityEngaged.pdf> (Accessed 13 August 2012), and aforementioned Sontag. A short documentary on the acclaimed 1994 production of rock opera Hair is also available at: <www.dailymotion.com/video/x86ljm_kosa-hair-sarajevopart-1_creation> (Accessed on July 23, 2012). Bojan Bili! graciously agreed to share with me the transcript of his interview with Grebo, which featured empirical information on Radio ZID. Other interviews are my own. To highlight these tensions, I often place in quotation marks certain phrases like spirit of Sarajevo and urban culture to make the reader pause and recognise such rhetorical frames as political and ideological statements with potentially problematic implications. Former radio host and cultural activist, Aida Kalender originally put this argument forward during our April 2012 interview.

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context, new kinds of ambiguous positionality vis--vis official institutions became possible. Finally, due to the breakdown of everyday routines and schedules, many Sarajevans, and especially the youth, suddenly had more time to pursue different creative endeavours. The title refers to this new horizon through the idiom of wartime freedom,13 which accents the strangely enabling character of what was otherwise a largely disempowering situation. I begin with the independent radio station ZID, move through alternative music scene and end with postcards entitled Greetings from Sarajevo. A radio that did not sleep: The story of The Wall Sarajevos independent station Radio ZID began in late 1992 as one of the key wartime initiatives of Zdravko Grebo, University of Sarajevos most famous Professor of Law.14 During the early 1990s, Grebo became known to the wider public for his involvement in anti-nationalist and reform initiatives and for his level-headed interventions against rising political tensions. As a part of his pre-war public engagement, he briefly worked as a host of radio talk show also called ZID (Zdravko i Dru#tvo, or Zdravko and Company) on another local station, which would become the seed for the new and eponymous independent radio station. The trope of the wall, which originally invoked the momentous 1989 reunification of Germany, soon became a more ominous symbol of the rapid deterioration of the political situation in Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo, the wall spoke of the horror of isolation, violence and political divisions, but also of the willingness of people to break down these barriers. The iconic logo of ZID, inspired by a detail in 1559 Pieter Bruegels painting Netherlandish Proverbs, featured a human figure banging her head against the wall a wall that this person could well bypass, but chooses, instead to confront.15 A quintessential image of a quixotic resolve, this logo also came to reference Sarajevans dogged and at times even absurdly defiant response to the brutality of the siege.
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It is important to note that artists and cultural producers, contrary to assumptions which underlie the so-called totalitarian paradigm, enjoyed significant opportunities for creative expression and engagement in socialist Yugoslavia. My choice of term freedom (in quotation marks) in no way denies this, nor do I claim that the fall of Yugoslavia somehow liberated artists from the yoke of a repressive socialist state. To the contrary, I acknowledge various continuities between the socialist era and wartime. By invoking freedom, I am instead highlighting the opportunities afforded by this vulnerable and liminal time, when Bosnian state institutions were still in emergence. In that way I hope to also offer some cues as to why this terrible wartime period has become an object of nostalgia. Grebo had a political career as a reform-inclined, young promise member of the League of Communists, a position that he abandoned in 1990, in favour of the short-lived Green Party. His list of wartime credentials includes his work as the founder of the Open Society Fund (Soro# Foundation) and the Helsinki Parliament of Citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His disillusioned manner and dark humour notwithstanding, Grebo is perhaps Sarajevos best-known public intellectual, still widely admired for his role during the war. See Mary Kaldor, Sarajevo's Reproach, Progressive, 57 (1993) 9, p. 21.

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In December 1992, after having enlisted a little help of some friends and UNPROFOR forces, Grebo managed to bring the basic technological equipment necessary for the production of radio programming into the besieged Sarajevo.16 Founding a new and independent radio station was, in part, motivated by the need to fill a media vacuum caused by the shortages of electricity and resources, which drastically reduced the ability of the print and television media to reach the public. Radio offered a sensible alternative, because it was cheap to produce: the start-up equipment cost no more than 50,000 Deutschmarks.17
Figure 1: The iconic logo of Radio ZID, inspired by a detail from Bruegels painting

Radio ZID

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Interview with Zdravko Grebo, conducted by Bojan Bili! in Sarajevo (June 2011). Ibid.

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In terms of the technological aspect, radio was also more forgiving and flexible, because it did not rely so much on the availability of electrical power.18 To keep their radio receivers on, Sarajevans used an assortment of means, including small commercial and larger car batteries, solar power, modified electricity from telephone jacks, illegal hook-ups to (usually military) priority power stations, generators and even ingenious adaptations of bicycle dynamos. Like its audience, Radio ZID used a variety of such technologies to keep its broadcasts afloat, resorting at times to stealing electricity from the nearby military headquarters. Finally, in autumn 1994, ZID received its own generator, thanks to the generosity of a cultural centre from Amsterdam, and the help of Dutch journalists and peacekeepers.19 Despite the lack of basic resources, the station managed to broadcast its programme 24 hours per day. During the course of the war, ZID formally employed only six full-timers at any given time, with much of its programming content and labour provided by volunteers.20 In the first year of the stations existence, the staff had to rely on improvisation and creativity. If telephone lines were working, listeners would have the opportunity to call in and weigh in on the issues discussed; sometimes radio hosts, including Grebo himself, would call up various friends outside of Sarajevo, including intellectuals, musicians and artists from other parts of the former Yugoslavia on air.21 At one point, the management team decided to invite writers, poets, artists and many other creative producers who had remained in the city to create their own, hour-long radio shows.22 This list included authors and poets Marko Ve#ovi! and Semezdin Mehmedinovi!, young filmmakers like Sr%an Vuleti!, theatre directors Haris Pa#ovi! and Dino Mustafi!, as well as many other renowned and emerging intellectuals and artists. Among these names was also that of Karim Zaimovi!, a young journalist, comic book enthusiast and writer of fantasy stories, which were read over the waves of Radio ZID before he tragically lost his life from a mortar shell in August 1995.23 In many ways, ZID became a gathering place for the most prolific and the most talented; it became an island where culture, art and music thrived.
18 19 20 21 22 23 See Zala Vol$i$ and Mojca Plan#ak, Radio Stations as Spaces for Political Alternatives during the Yugoslav Wars, this volume. See Jolanda Keelom, Through a Hole in the Wall, Media Center Online, 18 April 2012. Available at: <www.media.ba/mcsonline/en/tekst/through-hole-wall> (Accessed 23 July 2012). Initially, wartime institutions in the city granted ZID the right to employ 32 full-timers, but the station never fully used this allowance. See Vlado Azinovi!, Zdravko Grebo and Rade Jevti!, Upozorenje: Udar u Zid, Oslobo"enje, 12 January 1995, p. 12. For a wonderful snapshot of the wartime atmosphere in the studio, see: Hrvoje Batini!, Groanin Radio, Media Centar Online, 4 April 2012. Available at: <www.media.ba /mcsonline/bs/tekst/groanin-radio> (Accessed 23 July 2012). Interview with Zdravko Grebo conducted by Bojan Bili! in Sarajevo, in June 2011. His stories have since been compiled into a book, see Karim Zaimovi!, Tajna d#ema od malina (Sarajevo: Biblioteka Dani, 2005).

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From its modest beginnings, Radio ZID intended to be an alternative to the state-controlled radio stations, which had been enlisted as the megaphones of political propaganda and charged with the upkeep of patriotic morale. By contrast, ZID often emitted different international news programmes produced by Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and the BBC, so as to keep its audiences informed of other perspectives on the Bosnian war.24 In addition, the station offered an array of original programming, including shows on sociological and cultural themes, radio dramas, reports on everyday activities of Sarajevos inhabitants, literature and arts. The station further encouraged alternative aesthetic forms by commissioning radio jingles that were themselves little pieces of art. Finally, throughout the war, ZID also provided various forms of public service. During the months when children could not attend their war schools due to freezing temperatures, ZID created a programme called Zimska #kola [Winter School], which could reach pupils during the pause in instruction.25 In 1994, with the help of donations from UNICEF, ZID expanded its childrens programme, creating &areni zid [The Colourful Wall], which featured the performances of children who came to the station to tell stories and recite poems.26 In its broad educational mission, and orientation toward domains such as culture and arts, ZIDs programming helped to generate and maintain an alternative social imaginary amidst a brutal wartime siege.27 In some ways, ZIDs commitment to cultural themes stemmed out of the desire to create an oasis where its listeners could escape the harsh realities of everyday life. By creating this alternative soundscape, ZID turned culture into an instrument that could show that despite the dangerous, dehumanising and humiliating conditions, Sarajevo was still a city, a modern, European civilisation whose sensibilities and very survival challenged the positions and methods of barbarians on the hills.28 This theme of a clash of civilisations became one of the main tropes through which ZID communicated its purpose and project, especially to the many foreign journalists, prominent intellectuals and other outsiders who visited Sarajevo during the war.29 The stations commitment to
24 25 26 See Ai. P., ZID probija barijere: Glas Amerike dopire i do Sarajeva, Oslobo"enje, 13 November 1994, p 7. Azinovi! et al., Upozorenje, p. 12. For more details on the programming, see FAMA Collection, Projects-Radio ZID Sarajevo, Cultural Survival Newsletter 1993-1994, 1 (1994). Available at: <www.famacollection.org/index.php/FC-CSN-94-ENG-N1/entry/fc_csn_94_ n1_ 04> (Accessed 23 July 2012). On the profile and mission of the station, see FAMA Collection, Radio Zid-Art Radio. Phases such as these were a part of the vocabulary that Sarajevans, especially cultural producers and artists, used to describe the predicament of the citys population, which was being bombarded from the surrounding hills. All of my interlocutors invoked such notions of civilisation and Kultur in an ironic key, and many subsequently reflected upon their nave beliefs that informed their past use of such rhetorical frames. See, e.g., Tom Bass, Balkan Radio Travelogue, Part 3, Heise Online, 26 September 1997. Available at: <www.heise.de/tp/artikel/1/1261/1.html> (Accessed 14 August 2012); Christopher Hitchens, The Death of Bosnia, The Nation, 23 September 1996, p. 6; David Rieff, Once Upon A Time, in Bosnia, Salmagundi, 113 (1997), p. 16; Salman Rush-

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helping organise concerts, film festivals, exhibits and many other cultural events under siege, impressed upon the visitors an image of Sarajevos wartime culture as a form of heroic resistance against the war. The effect was, by and large, intended among Sarajevos established and fledging cultural elites, who chose to confront ethnic nationalism with unabashed, even nave, urbanophilia and cosmopolitanism. For a long time, ZIDs staff and management insisted that their station was neutral a claim that some of its employees, including radio host Aida Kalender, eventually began to see as complicated and potentially problematic. The question of whether one could be neutral in a besieged city where civilians were dying and starving amidst bombings and sniper attacks, troubles ZIDs creator, Zdravko Grebo, today, who categorically refuses to valorise any pacifist stand in conditions of total warfare.30 Nevertheless, ZID refused to, for example, play patriotic songs or emit any kind of programming that celebrated militarism. At that time, the claim of neutrality perhaps primarily functioned as a description of ZIDs non-partisanship, and especially its refusal to give unconditional, unquestioning support to the Bosnian government, dominated by Izetbegovi!s Party of Democratic Action [Stranka demokratske akcije (SDA)]. During the latter years of war, SDAs increasingly chauvinistic, exclusionary and anti-secularist programme started to denigrate the initial vision of multi-ethnic, secular Bosnia and Herzegovina which had been so important to the argument for independence. In this changing political context, the extremely ethnically mixed composition of ZIDs workforce perhaps itself began to look like a political statement.31 Yet such sources of difference were never discussed among the people affiliated with the station. True to its urban,32 cosmopolitan identity, ZID never made ethnic or religious identity a determining factor in any situation; in fact, its employees did not even feel the need to formally announce their anti-nationalist disposition, since it was inherent to their way of life. Today, it is difficult to account for the political impact of this collective orientation. ZID, according to Kalender, may have had its values and its vision of cosmopolitanism, but it was never truly subversive, in so far that it never harshly attacked the inchoate Bosnian state (as that could have been dangerous). Nonetheless, like many other institutions that did not fall in line with SDAs aims, ZID too, came into conflict with the official institutions, when the remaining four of its male employees received draft notices in 1995. The
die, The City of Our Dreams, The Guardian, 25 April 1994, p. 20; Dana Hull, Welcome from Sarajevo, Washington City Paper, 26 March 1999. Available at: <www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/16967/welcome-from-sarajevo> (Accessed 23 July 2012). Interview with Zdravko Grebo conducted by Bojan Bili! in Sarajevo, in June 2011. Interview with Kalender, 5 April 2012. Stef Jansen observed that during the 1990s, urban became a byword in the region describing a vast variety of projects, events and places, which wanted to set themselves apart from increasingly dominant nationalist values and aesthetic forms (see Jansen, Antinacionalizam, p. 152).

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station sent letters of protest to local institutions, domestic and foreign media, managing, in the end, to prevail.33 In such moments, by standing up to the disciplinary mechanisms of the wartime state and its narrow vision of patriotism, ZID maintained its status as an alternative wartime institution. Such a status was not only protected through the commitment to neutrality, or the ethnic composition of its workforce. By rendering official political vocabularies secondary to the citys cultural and social life (seen as the source of Sarajevos moral superiority in relation to nationalist zealots), ZID announced that culture provides a superior, more ethically pure alternative to politics. This move was in no way surprising: during late socialism, cultural elites throughout the Eastern Europe saw such a reorientation towards creative endeavour as a means of (as Czech dissidents like Havel would put it) living in truth. By taking this anti-political stand, they sought the ground for an ethical life outside of official ideology or formal political relations, often exalting the presumably authentic arena of culture and everyday life.34 This view persisted during the course of the war; here, ZIDs position may be seen as broadly descriptive of the alternative scene at large. The stations support of culture, arts and music as space at once enabled by the wartime state but also removed from it, stemmed from an unspoken conviction that such arenas could protect and nurture alternative forms of thinking and living. Though such power seems soft, its effects can be profound. ZIDs greatest political contribution lies in the fact that it developed cultural and aesthetic sensibilities among its audience, which could not always fit neatly into emerging nation-building projects. Much of this pedagogical influence happened spontaneously: if ZID became a perceived citadel of anti-nationalism and anti-war effort, it was not because it had a coherent political project aimed at such outcomes. It did so, in large part, through its unique music profile and stewardship of the burgeoning local underground scene. Rock the siege: The soundscapes of the war and milieus that produced them It is often said that an entire generation of Sarajevans who came of age during the siege owes its musical tastes to Radio ZID. To ZIDs creators and staff, music was a means of pedagogy, a way to shape not only tastes and
33 See Radio ZID, Tra"imo jedinstvene kriterije: Saop#tenje Radija ZID, Oslobo"enje, 20 January 1995, p. 11; Johann P. Fritz, Senior Journalists Mobilized for Military Service, The International Press Institute, 8 February 1995. Available at: <www.freemedia. at/index.php?id=246&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=2339&cHash=597f4daf93> (Accessed 23 July 2012). The very fact this disposition emerges in a hyper-politicised context, first during socialism and then under a wartime siege, testifies to its inherent political character. But what distinguishes this kind of politics is the absence of a workable political programme; it can be lived and experienced as authentic, it can be a source of meaning and an ethical platform; yet it is very difficult to translate into a movement or a form of agency capable of formal intervention, especially against mortars and snipers. A similar point was first made by Devi!, Anti-War Initiatives.

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sensibilities, but attitudes and values. Consequently, the hosts and management invested a lot of energy in developing the stations unique music profile. DJs dismissed standard and largely parochial pop or folk music repertoires, patriotic songs or even the music made by New Wave and alternative bands from the region, which did not meet the stations strict aesthetic criteria. Instead, they brought in new genres like grunge, hardcore, and alternative rock, introducing to Sarajevos audiences, music that was becoming globally popular, but had a different, more aggressive style.35 To accomplish this, ZID began to assemble a modest collection of CDs, which grew as foreign journalists brought in new albums during their trips in and out of Sarajevo.36 In addition to playing music, ZID developed original programmes that showcased new bands and themes related to music, including No Sleep Till and its special segment that would become known as Demo-Top. Hosted by Armin Jamakosmanovi!Jama and Aida Kalender, No Sleep Till37 began in July 1994 as the much anticipated flagship show of the radios night-time programme. Geared towards teenagers and other young Sarajevans, the show quickly attained an impressive following. Interest in the programme sharply increased after the hosts began showcasing music being made in besieged Sarajevo, starting with a demo recording of a song Aint No Time to Say Goodbye by Hotch Potch. Having obtained a recording of the song, the hosts decided to play it along two more demo recordings from the bands Big Daddy and Protest. Soon, without any invitation, hundreds of people started calling the radio show to give their opinions and vote for the best song. Given this enthusiastic response, the hosts extended the invitation to other unsigned bands to bring their own recordings to the station. Then, a miracle happened: the station received some forty recordings, featuring various styles of music, including punk, hard core, rock, hip hop, rap and even techno. Some musicians walked for miles from different parts of the city to bring these tapes, most of which were made on a simple tape recorder, in various basements and shelters. The band members were young teenage boys, or young men who played music in the pauses between their shifts on the frontlines. To them, music served as a spiritual asylum, a way out of their isolation, angst and alienation. Demo Top recognised their musical efforts, making them known to the wider Sarajevan public and creating a sense of
35 36 See Armin Jamakosmanovi!, No Sleep Till, Rock Under Siege Fanzine, AprilMay 1995, p. 14 ZIDs DJs often compiled wish lists and gave them to the international visitors, who would sometimes walk into music shops in New York or Paris and discover that these albums had not yet come out. ZIDs staff was proud of its knowledge and ability to keep up with the latest music trends; the fact that their information was up to date served to prove that Sarajevo was not a black hole, but a city still connected to the world. The shows name, originally in English, references not only its late-night timing, but also the fact that because of the curfew and limitations on night-time movement in the city, both ZIDs team and its radio audience were stuck inside for the duration of the night. Aida herself would spend days at the station without returning home, not only because of the availability of electricity, but also because she felt protected by the positive atmosphere that distinguished the station from the rest of the city.

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excitement. The show achieved such a cult status that it prompted hundreds of listeners to organise large sleepovers in homes of friends whose phones were still working, just to be able to cast votes call in support of their favourite (usually also neighbourhood) bands. The success of Demo-Top convinced ZID that the station needed to do more to help and promote the burgeoning underground music scene. On 14 January 1995, ZID used the occasion of its own two-year anniversary to stage a momentous concert of unsigned bands in the renowned club Sloga [Unity] under the name Rock Under the Siege (RUTS).38 RUTS was not the first concert organised in Sarajevo during the war,39 but it was perhaps the most well known and the most iconic. Jamakosmanovi! and Kalender took the lead as organisers, choosing only fourteen bands out of almost forty that sent their recordings to the radio station. Adi Sarajli!, another radio host from ZID worked as the MC for the concert. ZID provided the generator that could supply electricity for the bands on stage. As a gesture of its support to Sarajevos new bands, Slovenian band Laibach sent in a huge print that served as the stage background. Because of the curfew, the concert had to start at 6 pm, a detail that on some level seemed antithetical to rock n rolls antiestablishment character. Nevertheless, Sloga was packed, filled with screaming young fans, for some of whom this was their first ever real concert. The mood was completely euphoric, despite the crowded hall, challenges with organisation and technical problems that a few bands faced on stage. Among the people who witnessed the concert, hardly anyone remembers what or how well these bands played.40 The very fact this was such a large event, organised and happening under siege made for a unique and inimitable atmosphere. Undoubtedly, RUTS became possible because of the resources and the power of ZID, whose employees were already becoming very skilled promoters and organisers of cultural events. In fact, given Sarajevos wartime insularity and small size, Sarajevos cultural producers constantly worked in collaboration. Nevertheless, a hierarchy was already emerging both among
38 For a compilation of memories of organisers, band members and attendees at this concert published after the war, see Radio Sarajevo, Rock under the Siege Spomenar, RadioSarajevo.ba, 14 January 2010. Available at: <www.radiosarajevo.ba/content /view/18713/260> (Accessed 23 July 2012). Already in spring 1993, amidst the worst bombings and shortages, local bands began playing small concerts in the clubs Sloga and Art Scene Obala at the Academy of Fine Arts. The first major alternative music event during wartime, to the best of my knowledge, is the anniversary concert of SCH, performed on 4 May 1993. See Nikolai Jeffs, Some People in This Town Dont Want to Die Like a Hero: Multiculturalism and the Alternative Music Scene in Sarajevo, in Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins (eds.), Rock & Roll and Nationalism: A Multinational Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 119, here p. 1. For another account of the concerts that took place before Rock under the Siege, see Dino Bajramovi!, 'etni$ke granate nisu sprije$ile sarajevske bendove da nastave sa radom! Slobodna Bosna, 25 September 1993, p. 64. For such a perspective, see Radio Sarajevo (Dino), Rock pod opsadom Radio ZID-a, RadioSarajevo.ba, 9 January 2010. Available at: <www.radiosarajevo.ba/content /view/18402/260/> (Accessed 14 August 2012).

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cultural workers and media promoters and the musicians themselves. A few of the bands that played at RUTS were already semi-professional, but the vast majority came together during the war, as young teenagers living in the same neighbourhoods found, in music, a way to express themselves and pass the time. To do so, they borrowed, scavenged for and at times even bought instruments, regularly organising their rehearsals in basements, shelters and storage units, despite a perpetual lack of electricity. RUTS evolved out of such improvisations, which the audiences of Demo-Top recognised as reflective of a generational experience. For example, one of these bands, Pessimistic Lines, formed in the residential neighbourhood of Dobrinja, which became a ghetto on the front line in 1992. Cut off from the rest of the city, as well as from the flows of resources and humanitarian aid, Dobrinjans could barely keep themselves safe, let alone participate in the social life of the rest of the city. Marina Anti!, one of the original members of Pessimistic Lines (and one of the very few female musicians on the underground scene), recalls that she and her friends did not go to any real school41 essentially for at least two years. Faced with an abundance of free time and lack of safe public spaces, they started hanging out in one of the local bomb shelters, which they turned into their playground. There, this group of teenagers began developing a range of interests, including forming several bands, creating an occasional issue of Die Bosnische Zeitung, their own satirical publication, and starting a book club where they read the works of Dostoyevsky, Camus and Kierkegaard together. Coming of age in this extreme situation, Marinas group embraced absurdity and hysteria as a means to rise above the violence of war. Unsurprisingly, their choice of music genre was punk, whose anti-establishment, anti-humanist underpinnings perfectly mirrored their own. Of the bands formed in this bomb shelter, Pessimistic Lines enjoyed the longest life, especially after it was discovered by ZID and brought in to participate in RUTS. Pessimistic Lines, although coming into existence in an even more violent and militarised environment, shared many things in common with the rest of the bands that formed on the underground music scene in Sarajevo. According to journalist and critic Mariela Doman$i!,42 the existence of this musical milieu, in and of itself, carried an inherent political message, and on two distinct levels. First, the members of these bands and their audiences came from different, allegedly warring and incompatible ethnic groups; their friendships and collaborations challenged the view that the only relevant bonds among people stemmed out of shared origins and blood. Secondly, by playing rock n roll (in its diverse styles and instantiations), these bands called upon the legacy of this music, its role in enabling protest, breaking
41 42 For an education scholars perspective on wartime schools in Dobrinja, see David M. Berman, The War-Schools of Dobrinja (San Francisco, CA: Cado Gapp Press, 2007). Mariela Doman$i!, Ja$i od sila mraka, Rock under the Siege Fanzine, AprilMay 1995, p. 7.

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down of barriers and making the views of the marginalised and ignored heard. Playing this music in Sarajevo under siege did not simply amount to a hobby it was a political statement, a testament of the vitality of those very orientations and sensibilities that were now under the attack by the nationalists.
For people who pursued rock n roll, music was the way and the means to preserve their mental health. To play meant being alive, functioning, surviving, being in possession of a source of meaning and a goal... [To play meant] to wage the war against two enemies, against fascism and primitivism (papanluk). Against fascism speak their very names, because playing together are Josip and Bakir, Atila and Emir, Edin and Dejan, Petar and Senad, Esad and Neboj#a. Against primitivism stands the fact that rock n roll is an urban genre of music, and of not only music. It is an expression of protest, of frustrations and of the plight of a generation. Its a way of thinking and living.43

Whether underground bands from Sarajevo, which were quite heterogeneous in their message and style, actually saw themselves as making a political statement remains an open question. The loose group that formed in Dobrinja indeed included according to Marina not only Serbs and Croats, but Slovenes and Montenegrins but it had already developed a cynical attitude towards the humanist ideals and cosmopolitan narratives that marked much of the discourse of Sarajevos savvy cultural ambassadors.44 Marinas group was known to stage various provocations in the Dobrinja ghetto, especially during the time when they were visited by, or paraded in front of international journalists. In contrast to the citys cultural elite, which sought to send out the best possible image, these youngsters wanted to shock and alienate their visitors. At one time, they pretended to be a group of teenagers with extensive mental and physical disabilities, and another time, the most daring among them covered himself in swastikas and pretended to be a Neo-Nazi. When the Sarajevo tunnel opened, bringing all sorts of smugglers into the city, these teenagers would sometimes direct these disoriented war opportunists towards the snipers, so as to punish them for seeking profits on the black market. Although the citys more established cultural and artistic producers also lived on the edge, they inhabited a very different structural position, which
43 44 Ibid. In the context of wartime Dobrinja, such cynicism could be read as the direct result of citizens at times sobering interactions with the Bosnian army and the state. Due to the fact that Dobrinja was expected to fall soon after the breakout of fighting, the neighbourhood faced both prolonged periods of systematic neglect and overwhelming presence of the army in its streets. Such circumstances gave residents a different, often more critical perspective on the war and purportedly heroic defence of a cosmopolitan city. What is more, because of their position, Dobrinjans often did not participate in the same activities as the rest of the city. For example, Pessimistic Lines never listened to ZID prior to being interviewed by them. All of this is to say that important micro-geographic differences existed within besieged capital which mapped onto variable knowledge about and access to cultural productions. Separate parts of the city experienced the war very differently.

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gave them more responsibility but also limited their avant-gardism. These professionals quickly recognised that the presence of international journalists afforded them an opportunity to act on behalf of their city and its inhabitants. In addition to the theatre circle of Haris Pa#ovi!, and the emerging experiment that was to become the Sarajevo Film Festival, Radio ZID became a leader of this campaign. As it grew into its role as a media outlet of local wartime culture, the station saw in the emergence of this underground music scene an opportunity to send a message out of Sarajevo to the rest of the world. Thanks to ZIDs advocacy, many international media organisations, including the New York Times and MTV reported on the RUTS concert.45 ZID made a sound recording of the concert, which, with the help of a Dutch foundation for rock music, was made into a live CD.46 In Sarajevo proper, Kalender and Sarajli! conducted interviews with the band members, which were broadcast and later printed in the Fanzine Rock Under the Siege. The unambiguous message of these materials (some of which are available in English) is that wartime culture generally, and underground music scene specifically, in many ways symbolise Sarajevos distinct urban identity; an identity that stands in radical opposition to the values, tastes and dispositions of its attackers. In his RUTS manifesto, Jamakosmanovi! states that the music of these bands stands against primitivism and traditionalists and barbarians who do not understand modern tastes and the urban way of life. He claims that by defending rock n roll against nationalism and fascism, these young musicians were proving that their city is a part of Western civilisation. Today, such dualistic tropes of urban vs. rural, traditional (or primitive) vs. modern, sophisticated vs. parochial, have a rather problematic, even simplistic tone.47 In retrospect, Jamakosmanovi!s blunt intervention reads as aggressive, perhaps even dogmatic. But at the time when the city was surrounded, and under attack by people who valorised the (pseudo)traditional symbols of blood and nation while glorifying violence and mass slaughter, the citys spokespersons could not afford to be hesitant or ambiguous in their message. Even though such dichotomies seem banal and nave, they were also strategically deployed to construct an image of a heroic city full of remarkable people who lived dignified lives under fire. This family of narratives around the urban spirit of Sarajevo also marks a departure from the attitudes espoused by Sarajevos pre-war cultural
45 46 See Neil Strauss, The Pop Life, The New York Times, 10 August 1995. See Sandra Kuki!, Cigla po cigla-CD, Oslobo"enje, 5 May 1995, p. 7. Filmmaker Sr%an Vuleti! was charged with the task of recording the concert, which he did with the help from the national TV station. However, this recording has since gone missing. No one, including Vuleti! himself, today has a copy of this video. Many scholars of the region have produced insightful critiques of such dichotomies: John Allcock, Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-Up of Yugoslavia, Balkanologie, 6 (2002) 1-2, pp. 10134; Marko (ivkovi!, Too Much Character, Too Little Kultur, Balkanologie, 2 (1998) 2, pp. 7797; Xavier Bougarel, Yugoslav Wars: The Revenge of the Countryside between Sociological Reality and Nationalist Myth, East European Quarterly, 33 (1999) 2, pp. 15775. Jansen also has a chapter dedicated to the issue in Antinacionalizam, pp. 10968.

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scene, so strongly influenced by the sub-culture movement New Primitivs.48 In contrast to the wartime underground, which explicitly and directly opposed itself to primitivism, New Primitivs over-identified49 with the actual traditionalists, simple-minded peasants, nationalists and parochial socialist apparatchiks, often taking these peoples scripts to the extreme, in order to expose their absurdity. Although the tragic disintegration of this movement falls out of the scope of this chapter, their strategies provide an important counterpoint to the frameworks mobilised by the wartime cultural producers, who emphasised (and without any irony) their modern, urban and Western sensibilities. Wishing to address an imagined international audience and awaken its humanitarian impulse, their aesthetic forms focused not the specificity of Sarajevo, with its provincial, working class, Ottoman-dominationinfluenced alterity (which New Primitivs celebrated), but its flipside representation as the master signifier of the imagined cosmopolitan, liberal West.50 Even though this shift was designed by the savvy spokespersons of this alternative cultural milieu, many of whom were English speaking, cosmopolitan, politically liberal and intellectually minded, it came to effect the representation of the entire scene (regardless of standpoints of individual bands). While this underground emerged as a product of a specific geography and history, it appeared to want nothing more than to de-provincialise itself, to, in this symbolic way, break itself free from the military enclosure that was stifling (even while enabling) it. This simultaneous placement of the music underground, and the desire of its producers to speak the global language of rock n roll can be observed in the very songs performed at RUTS. In a 1996 text, Aida Kalender and Dijana Marjanovi! characterised the lyrics of these songs as aggressivesharp, ironic, cynical, full of black humour and open to some of the taboo topics.51 This new kind of poetry occasionally spoke about the exceptional wartime predicaments of young Sarajevans, as in Sarajevo Feeling, a sardonic take on the war by the band Protest:
Its wonderful here, no one else is having such a great time. Im so happy I feel like crying each day. We even have electricity every other day, when were very joyful, we dont leave the apartment. Water we no longer drink, we lick off the

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A more detailed analysis of the movement is available in: Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007). For more on over-identification as a strategy, see Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, American Stiob, or What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveals about Contemporary Political Culture in the West, Cultural Anthropology, 25 (2010) 2, pp. 179221; Slavoj (i"ek, Why are Laibach and the NSK Not Fascists, Mars 5, (1993), pp. 34. Of course, this kind of rhetoric both predates and has outlived the war; it comes in many versions (European Jerusalem), we were/are real Europe and so on. According to Marina Anti!, the group in Dobrinja continued to identify itself with New Primitivs attitudes than with the cosmopolitan narratives of artistic producers in the rest of the city. Aida Kalender and Dijana Marjanovi!, Rock under the Siege, Radio ZID, 1996. Available at: <www.kabi.si/si21/IASPM/aida.html> (Accessed 23 July 2012).

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dew, we never take baths nor wash our hair. Our dear friends, come back over here, to see what a great time we are all having.52

Other songs grappled with the real and figurative darkness of Sarajevos nights and the general sense of despair and rage caused by the prolonged physical and psychological entrapment themes amenable to translation that could resonate with teenagers beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unsurprisingly, many of the songs were about love, usually unrequited and tragic, or in rare cases obstructed by the presence of foreign journalists and soldiers, who had booze and cigarettes, and therefore always got the best girls. Yet an astonishing number of these songs were also completely unspecific in terms of their context, sometimes even speaking about things like drug addiction, which often feature prominently in rock music, but were in no way central to the experience of wartime siege.53 Moreover, many of the songs performed that evening were in English, perhaps addressing some imagined international audience. However, this tension between the context of emergence of these songs and the desire of their authors to break out of their prison manifested itself again in the fact this English was imperfect and improvised (and in the truly brazen, punk fashion, acknowledged and accepted as such). Engineered as the ultimate signal of Sarajevos modern, cosmopolitan identity, RUTS could not help but monumentalise the historical-political context that gave life to the underground scene.54 Postcards from the end of the world: Group Trio and the pop art of the war The residents of Sarajevo, faced with dangers and various existential pressures, often found little pieces of normality, sanity and hope in wartime art, theatre and music productions.55 Sarajevos artists and cultural producers
52 Here are the original lyrics: Divno nam je ovdje/nikom nije ovako/od sre!e bih ja /svakog dana plak'o // Imamo i struje $ak/svakog drugog dana/kad smo vrlo radosni/ne izlazimo iz stana//Vodu vi#e ne pijemo/ve! li"emo rosu/nikada se ne kupamo/nit peremo kosu.//Dragi na#i prijatelji/vratite se vamo/da vidite kako mi se super zabavljamo. This observation was also made by Jeffs, Some People in this Town Dont Want to Die Like a Hero, p. 14. Some contemporary writings on this scene, notably the samizdat publication Sarajevo-6 Feet Under which provides a compilation of texts written by the unsigned wartime bands, criticise this fascination with English and American music and culture. In my view, this criticism is fair, and in some ways warranted by the uncritical mobilisation of tropes like the Western civilisation by many from this milieu. However, it is equally problematic to reduce this underground scene to some pale echo of its American and European counterparts, or a form of mimicry. See nEUE nRFORM, Sarajevo 6 Feet Under ili recikla"a pro#losti: Poezija sarajevskih alter bendova u periodu 1992-1995, Available at: <es.scribd.com/doc/60187608/Sarajevo-6-Feet-Under> (Accessed 23 July 2012). Even though my interlocutors insist that residents of Sarajevo never had as much appreciation for art, theatre, film and music, not everyone had equal opportunity to attend various cultural events. In certain parts of the city, movement was more limited; furthermore, class differences also dictated (as they had before the war) questions of access and the level of interest in such events. To take part in these activities was a privilege.

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understood the importance of their work, as they were themselves often consumers of such artefacts and events. However, the savviest among these creators also knew that their initiatives had the capacity to speak to publics beyond Sarajevo. No single initiative mastered this role better than a small group of designers from Sarajevo that became known as Trio. Its three core members Bojan and Dalida Had"ihalilovi!, and their friend Lejla Mulabegovi!, met and began collaborating in the mid 1980s, while they were students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. Before they became known for such works as the now widely recognisable reinvention of the Coca-Cola logo, which against red background and in white, swerving cursive, communicates to the viewer the message Enjoy Sara-Jevo, 19931994, the designers from Trio made a name for themselves by working on album covers and magazine layouts throughout Yugoslavia (Figure 2).56
Figure 2: Trios reinvention of the Coca-Cola logo is perhaps its best-known postcard

Trio

The arrival of war not only shocked them, but effectively turned their trio into a duo.57 Bojan and Dalida Had"ihalilovi!, the two designers who stayed in the city and eventually married during the siege, describe this period as
56 Their first major project was the album cover for the young pop-rock band Plavi orkestar, which originated in Sarajevo, but became very popular during the 1980s throughout Yugoslavia. For the bands first album, titled Soldatski bal, Trio redesigned the cover of The Beatles Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club, in some ways foreshadowing the bold, yet playful appropriations that characterised Trios wartime designs. In addition to its work on album covers of rock bands, Trio made a name for itself in the sphere of magazine design, having previously worked for publications all across the former Yugoslavia, including Globus in Zagreb, Lica in Sarajevo and Vreme in Belgrade. Their friend, Lejla Mulabegovi! emigrated to Switzerland on the eve of the war. During the siege, she continued to help and contribute to Trios work from a distance.

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filled with intense motivation for work, both in spite of and because of the scarcity of electricity, paper, colours and other materials necessary in their line of work.58 According to Bojan, from the very beginning, the design team sought a way to contribute to the citys resistance by offering their services to the new state institutions (including the army and the police). They were then hired for a range of projects, including redesign of the logo of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Railroads and the Tobacco Factory-Sarajevo, and the layout of the weekly magazine BH Dani, which continued to come out sporadically during the war. They pursued these projects with great diligence, even when such a course of action seemed absurd. Amidst chaos and destruction, at their own admission, they were busy planning out the entire future of the Bosnian Railroads, as if tomorrow, the first )iro train would embark on its journey through Bosnia.59 The duo worked at the Collegium Artisticum Gallery in the Skenderija complex, where thanks to the willingness of the nearby-stationed UN soldiers to provide them with one single electrical cable, they were in possession of enough electricity to power one computer and an electrical bulb. Over time, they also acquired several young volunteers who helped them with layouts and other tasks. For all this work, Bojan and Dalida rarely received any money; they were instead, compensated in various goods (often those needed to continue working) and cigarettes. Yet their most important wartime designs were precisely those that were not commissioned or paid for by anyone. In 1993, within a space of few days, Bojan and Dalida created their own, unique artistic statement in the shape of a series of postcards and posters, which spoke about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the outside world. Through their personal networks, they managed to print the first series of these postcards at the Geodesic Institute in Sarajevo; they drew their posters by hand, using old-fashioned means and media. Despite the challenges they faced in the production of these small artworks, Greetings from Sarajevo, turned out to be a hit. The postcards embodied a unique blend of globally recognisable, iconic images, reconfigured and made to speak about the siege of Sarajevo, and embedded, a characteristically Sarajevan subtext, that often relied on irony, sarcasm and very dark humour. Many of them were born out of associations thought up by the designers, their friends and sometimes even Sarajevos wartime visitors. And almost all of them were marked by a playfulness that made apparent the humour and resilience of those that dispatched them into the world. Iconic ads for Absolut Vodka were re-coded as Absolut Sarajevo, conveying a tale of emergence of a multicultural city as a product of
58 Most of this section draws on the interview I conducted with Bojan Had"ihalilovi! in July 2012. In addition, I have made use of the interview with Dalida conducted by BH Dani in April 2012. See Ma#a Durkali!, Dobra umjetnost nema veze sa onim #to ima# ili nema#, BH Dani, 6 April 2012, pp. 701. See interview with Ilko 'uli!, Za#to kukati kad mo"e# kuhati, Feral Tribune, 3 November 1994, pp. 189.

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history and lived experience; DC Comics Superman came to symbolise the Superhuman wartime Sarajevo; and the legendary artwork for The Twilight Zone became The Sarajevo Zone. Some of Trios postcards found inspiration among famous works of arts such as Edward Munchs Scream, which was juxtaposed against Trios own design of the urban skyline of Sarajevo, and Andy Warhols Campbell Soup that became a can pierced with bullets, titled Sarajevos condensed. Yet others drew on the citys recent history as the host of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games. The designers decision to mobilise such powerful and widely circulated images stemmed from their desire to address an international public by a means of a shared iconography. Such a repetition and reconfiguration of familiar images would not only resonate with potential audiences because of the shared references, but also communicate to the imagined Western public that Sarajevans were just like them. The very choice of format for these images that of a postcard, which is both a message from and about a place, made apparent the dialogic and self-conscious nature of these artworks. Meant to educate and perhaps also challenge stereotypes, the postcards were, on one level, purported testimonies about the history and the character of a besieged town. Yet they were also deliberately brazen, hyperbolic, selfaware, sarcastic, and full of the kind of pathos that Timothy Ash observed as a little heavy.60 For example, the Absolut Sarajevo postcard read:
Absolut Sarajevo is made from Authentic Bosnian citizens, Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jewish and Special blends, born in (the) rich Country of Bosnia. The spirit of togetherness is an age-old Bosnian tradition dating back more than 800 years. Sarajevo has been sold under the name Absolut since 1992.

In this short blurb, which, twenty years after the war, Bojan describes as nearly comical, the imagined foreign addressee learns not only the clichd story of the European Jerusalem, but also the fact its inhabitants are capable of at once cherishing and standing at a distance from such representations of themselves. Bojans contemporary reflections on this period mimic this playful and ironic wartime manner, often culminating in a moment of laughter about his naivet and pathos [patetika]. Describing Trios aesthetics as aggressive, direct, harsh and brazen [bezobrazna], he explains that the context of the siege created a need for a very direct, in-your-face mode of communication with the outside world. Trio was unscrupulous in its use of major global brands, believing that the context of war justified such bold and shameless re-appropriations and redesigns.61 Under the circumstances, such audacious statements and acts seemed perfectly permissible.
60 61 See Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present (New York, Random House, 1999), p. 152. In fact, the design group was almost sued by both DC Comics and Coca-Cola, both of which felt Greetings damaged their brand by tying it to the war. Interview with Had"ihalilovi!, July 2012.

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Figure 3: Trios redesign of Uncle Sam

Trio

Although the Greetings were intended for audiences outside of Sarajevo, they also addressed the residents of the besieged city. The Coca-Cola poster, as well as the play on the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe lovingly looking down upon the skyline of New York City, entitled here as Some Like it in Sarajevo emphasised enjoyment of a city, its charms and specificities, even in this dire situation. Intended perhaps as a message of resistance and spite, this notion of unremitting enjoyment of home, defined unambiguously against the notions of land or nation, also provided an alternative model of patriotism. This lokal-patriotizam originated from a situated, generational experience and intimate knowledge of a place. Greetings from Sarajevo, is paradoxically also a series of love letters to and about home. Nevertheless, while Greetings sought to communicate an alternative, not-reactionary version of such (local-)patriotism, Trio did not shy away from militaristic themes and associations in some of its other wartime works. Two designs, both inspired by the American illustrator J. M. Flaggs personas of Uncle Sam and Columbia, are the best examples of this approach. The 216

fact that the original designs call for military mobilisation and American involvement in the two World Wars was also no accident. Trios Uncle Sam points his finger at the audience, shouting: I want you to save Sarajevo (Figure 3). The Wake up America: Civilization Calls! featuring Uncle Sams female counterpart, Columbia, in Trios redesign demands: Wake up, Europe, Sarajevo Calls! Addressed to the Americans and the Europeans, such postcards quite literary demanded not just humanitarian, but also military intervention on behalf of the citizens of Sarajevo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina at large. In mobilising this wartime iconography, Trio set out to remind the West of its own purported history of guardianship of civilisation and its much-celebrated opposition to fascism.
Figure 4: Trios redesign of Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

Trio

Some of Trios reconfigurations of military iconography were more ironic, such as, for example, the award-winning redesign of the famous photograph 217

of the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima which celebrates American military victory over Japan (Figure 4). In Trios rendition of the image, soldiers are raising the Olympic flag, right under the bold title Olympic Games, Sarajevo 1994. The redesign of this particular glorification of military power is less explicit in its call for the intervention, but even more direct in its condemnation of the Wests hypocrisy, revealed in its allowing of an Olympic city to be subjected to such violence and destruction. Such an approach to design carries a heavy-handed ideological message, one which even its creator today characterises (and not without pleasure) as a form of impudent propaganda on behalf of Sarajevo and its people. Trio in some ways replaced the brutality of journalistic images of the war with an equally brutal, even opportunistic appropriation of the Wests own narratives about itself. However, in spite of their willingness to explicitly invoke the broadly humanist ideals of freedom, justice and rights, with which Western civilisation seemed synonymous, the members of Trio, like many of their compatriots in Sarajevo, did not necessarily understand the full extent of the contradictions that helped constitute such narratives in the first place. Like my other interlocutors, Bojan too commented on his own naivet with respect to the intervention that Trio was staging. Believing at that moment that Sarajevo was the centre of the world made perfect sense, as did sending postcards out of a besieged city to an imagined, yet caring, audience somewhere outside. As the years of war went on without any end in sight, this faith eroded; such a disillusionment bred a new kind of hostility in Trios design. This transformation is perhaps best exemplified on the cover of the Slovenian magazine Mladina, which Trio designed during their six month long sojourn in Ljubljana. On the eve of the fall of Srebrenica, the cover of this issue features a montage of naked Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the then Secretary General of the UN, kissing an equally naked, buff behind of Serbian president Slobodan Milo#evi!. The cover was a harsh criticism of the UNs policy towards Srebrenica, then a UN Safe Zone; tragically it also turned out to be prophetic, foreshadowing the mass slaughter and the UNs shameful role in enabling it. Despite these moments of controversy, Trio never saw itself as a political initiative of any sort, but as a group in the process of creating an artistic statement. Although Greetings became widely recognisable, and in many ways made wartime Sarajevo culture a trademark, the two core designers insist the entire process happened spontaneously. It was both a product of, and a response to, the circumstances in which the designers found themselves, which were in and of themselves politically ambiguous. On the one hand, by providing design services to the army, police and the nascent institutions, Trio was afforded the space to continue producing and working. Because they did everything for free, they were respected by everyone and largely left alone. No one ever even made an issue out of Bojans name, which hints at his ethnically mixed heritage.

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However, according to Bojan, because of its freelance organisation and alternative approach to design, Trio also never saw itself as a part of the system; moreover, the fact no one came knocking to challenge its unique artistic vision helped construct a sense of autonomy. In this space of what Bojan calls fantastic anarchy, created by the collapse of state institutions, an artist had a unique opportunity to create, free from any interference or censorship. Later, when Trio transformed itself into a marketing firm Fabrika, such a sense of artistic possibility became foreshortened. Nevertheless, from todays viewpoint, Bojan admits that Trio was never truly an underground initiative, but a unique wartime hybrid: a project tolerated and at times mobilised by the embryonic new state, and a small scale basement operation, with a unique aesthetic profile rooted in what Bojan calls a punk sensibility. Its most precious creations are precisely those that according to the designer could interestor feed no one. Both Bojan and Dalida felt transformed and invigorated by what happened in their surroundings during the siege. Witnessing the bloom of cultural production in the city, they felt inspired by their fellow artists. Each theatre production, each hastily put together concert, each exhibit in candlelight conjured up a moment of reckoning, because it could have been ones last. This euphoria and sense of solidarity is now gone. And so appear to be the times of when one could politically intervene through art. Not without pathos, he exclaims:
The muses have left. I guess they [only] want to guard places exposed to extreme war destruction. And then, after the war, they fly away. When you go back to your normal life, thats a pretty tough period, one that weve been in for the past 20 years. I actually feel as if this city is no better with the passing of time... much of its population has changed, and often they dont really know, they dont really understand what a city is or what it should be, what it should guard in its nucleus, and every day Sarajevo isnt visually more beautiful, even though a million of new things are being built, but in an unplanned, frivolous manner, without a vision while a posse of politicians takes their turns during elections, the kind of people who want to keep that system fucked up to its core, so that they could be the ones to lead the masses. And now you understand that you are struggling against some hidden enemy that you dont see or hear, thats all around you, and you no longer know how to fight against it, you simply lose the will.62

A contentious contention: Ambiguous politics of alternative culture Bojan Had"ihalilovi!s poignant reflection on the changed post-war conditions and the disappearance of the energy that served as inspiration in besieged Sarajevo resonates with the experiences of other affiliated cultural
62 Interview with Bojan Had"ihalilovi!, July 2012.

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producers, media workers and cultural activists in Bosnia and Herzegovinas capital. For those that participated in this vibrant cultural life, the siege was not only a time of horror but also a sort of a magical hour, when art was meaningful, rock concerts glorious and moral matters obvious and transparent. Embracing humanistic and cosmopolitan ideals, which they saw as constitutive of their own identities and communities, Sarajevos artists located in the creative arena, a ground for a struggle against wartime violence and the emerging national(ist) order. In this context, cultural production became a form of resistance to, and self-preservation from, chaos and destruction. These aesthetic interventions usually came hand in hand with a suspicion of formal politics, which sometimes helped cultural producers to preserve their distance from wartime Bosnian institutions. Such autonomy became especially important as the Bosnian leadership became less interested in ethnic, religious and ideological pluralism, which was central to a selfunderstanding of many of the people who identified with alternative cultural forms. However, as this chapter has shown, the political positionality of Sarajevos wartime cultural milieus was complex, and fraught with tensions and inconsistencies. Its affiliates shared a broad but sincere commitment to a liberal imaginary and ethics, marked by militant anti-nationalism, suspicion of tradition and religious doctrine, a dualistic view of society as one divided into urbanites and hillbillies [gra%ani i papci], and a love of rock n roll aesthetics, be it in its conventional or more radical forms. Moreover, artists, musicians and alternative media valorised creative expression at the expense of orthodox patriotism, national pride or tradition. This difference also drove them to set up alternative organisations and solidarities, many of which were directed outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, towards Western publics, intellectuals and reporters. Nevertheless, their willingness and ability to speak to the outside world, often through deployment of various tropes of civilisation, Europe, and art under struggle, did much to promote Sarajevos plight in the global arena. Yet, as this chapter has suggested, such engagement led to numerous ideological ambiguities and unintended consequences. The uncritical veneration of urban cosmopolitanism and Western modernity entailed also a mobilisation of developmentalist tropes and (self)-orientalising narratives. Given the history of deployment of such rhetoric both within and in various descriptions of the region63 (i.e. ancient ethnic hatreds, Balkan backwardness, etc.), such choices are extremely ironic. To this day, Sarajevos selfprofessed cosmopolitanism continues to also rely on other kinds of oppositions and exclusions usually directed towards those who are not urban enough revealing in part the elite (and sometimes even elitist) nature of
63 See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Stef Jansen, Svakodnevni orijentalizam: do"ivljaj Balkana/Evrope u Beogradu i Zagrebu, Filozofija i drustvo, 18 (2002), pp. 3372 and Milica Baki!-Hayden, Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia, Slavic Review, 54 (1995), pp. 91731.

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Sarajevos spirit. Once the veil of moral self-righteousness is lifted, the benefit of hindsight opens new and this time very difficult political questions. During the war, the cultural producers who remained in Sarajevo, nearly without exception, supported the cause of Bosnian independence. From their perspective, such a position stemmed not out of some exclusionary notion of national self-determination nor a wish for the destruction of Yugoslavia, which was already in the process of disappearing, but out of the (perhaps nave) desire to protect the multi-ethnic character of social life in Bosnia and Herzegovina proper. Artists wartime engagement was hence aimed at showing to the outside world that what was being attacked in Sarajevo was not just a political vision of an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, but a model of interethnic togetherness. Strategically exploiting, devising and proliferating the image of European Jerusalem, cultural ambassadors and alternative media became unlikely producers of a certain kind of wartime propaganda. While their rhetoric provided a much less militant alternative to the nationalist violence, one that often emphasised suffering of civilians, human rights and justice, they also did not shy away from demanding that Sarajevo be saved, by any and all means necessary. In the process, they managed to recruit many foreign intellectuals, artists and journalists in support of their cause, some of whom quite openly argued for an international military intervention. The case at hand therefore complicates the assumption that antiwar initiatives necessarily reject all forms of violence (or militaristic involvement of imperial powers) and that anti-nationalism always stands in opposition to the creation of new states. Among my interlocutors, many of these contradictions and complexities only became visible after the war, once new information surfaced and temporal distance made possible novel critical reflections. Aida Kalender, for one, today has a much more complicated attitude towards this time:
My first disappointments happened after the war, after I read (because regardless of everything, Sarajevans were in a sort of information fog, obsessed with existential questions, like will there be water, electricity, etc...) in an issue of Dani in 1996, some information about the fact that Bosnian forces sometimes controlled the access to electricity, whereas we had thought that entire time that it had been the Serbs. This was a huge realisation for me, because I recognised then that we were sacrificial lambs in service of political goals, which at one point began to totally differ from those original objectives which people lined up to defend, because of which we were so enthusiastic, because of which I was so fiery, for that secular, independent all of that began to lose its meaning sometime in 1993. But when things were revealed, and when Dani began to write about paramilitaries, about Caco, these stories were shocking to me. I dont know what Sarajevo we lived in but when we heard stories about people that were killed inside of the city, rapes, robberies, threats I realised we were all sacrificed. Now, I cannot claim with certainty that our government

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knew about all this, because that would also benefit the other side But ugly things happened, things that shook up my faith in that idealistic image of a city that is fighting against barbarism. I believed in it all completely, I have to confess, but when these dark episodes came to the surface, I realised that every war is an evil, and that it has to be avoided at all cost.64

Aidas lucid confession about her own disillusionment regarding the trackrecord of Bosnian forces and her own idealistic vision of the siege, ends in realisation that wars victimise people across the board and in a multitude of ways. The true costs of such conflicts only become known in the aftermath. The end of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina proved that; by ushering in a disappointing new reorganisation of political power, new forms of economic precariousness, and a new generation more amenable to mainstream tastes (which is said to be largely disinterested in rock n roll). From the vantage point of the post-war period, the strategies of Sarajevos (alternative) cultural milieus provide a testament to not only of courage and dedication but also of earnestness, perhaps even political naivet that characterise much of the cultural resistance in the besieged city. During the entire duration of the war, Sarajevos cultural ambassadors repeatedly sent the same message into the world, with what appeared to be to minimum effect. They eventually reached a point of tremendous fatigue and disillusionment, and remain unsure, to this day, of the impact their advocacy made. And while their contributions remain, in general, warmly remembered, today, new critical voices are questioning the excessive valorisation of such forms of war resistance (especially in contrast to the involvement in actual armed resistance). Even in Sarajevo proper, the world of hard moral truths painted in black and white colours, has been replaced by one shaded in gradients of grey. This new palette has also eroded the power of romance as a genre of emplottment of historical experience. Of alternatives and enclosures Prominent symbolic anthropologists like Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, theorised in the 1960s that conditions of liminality, in which subjects or collectivities are caught betwixt and between existing structures, create not only a sense of vulnerability and marginalisation, but also a strong sense of exuberance, autonomy and bonding. Turner described this phenomenon as communitas a spirit of solidarity that emerges among those who share the same predicament.65 The wartime siege of Sarajevo was one such moment,
64 65 Interview with Aida Kalender, April 2012. Van Gennep and Turner focus on religious and ritual settings, but their concepts have successfully travelled outside of those arenas, to describe other social phenomena, including those that are not coded in specific customs, but produced by unique events and situations. For the original discussion, see Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage (London: Routledge, 2004); Victor Turner, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period and the

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marked by the breakdown of existing institutions and the slow emergence of new ones. Such a situation helped enlist existing relationships for the purpose of new forms of creative engagement and experimentation. But what Van Gennep and Turner teach us is that moments like these are transient, and are always followed by new structural reorganisations and enclosures. Similarly, the end of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina brought in not only new opportunities, but also new marginalisations. Furthermore, it set the terms for a rude awakenings and a realisation that the charms of Sarajevos moment of fantastic anarchy were both illusory and not equally available to all. Likewise, this chapter has sought to problematise the dominant representations of Sarajevos wartime culture common to commentators both inside and outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which depict such efforts as the triumph of goodness over evil, as heroic resistance against savagery, or as proof that art is a basic human need, which only becomes heightened by the violence of war. Instead, I have looked at the ways these initiatives entailed differing valuations of cultural competence, and were both produced by and productive of narratives that purported to be non-ideological, neutral and universally applicable all the while they were absolutely motivated and emerging out of deeply held convictions that themselves were historical artefacts. Given its soft power, amidst snipers, mortar shells and new concentrations of political power, alternative culture could not become an actionable project for an alternative politics. Yet, the effects of this time remain relevant, in at least one important way. The wartime alternative scene and media gave to Sarajevo not only a reinvented cultural elite; it also helped maintain the existence of an oppositional imaginary. To this day, disciples of this urban, alternative culture, who were reared into adulthood under the pedagogical influence of Radio ZID, alternative music and other forms of wartime creativity form a loose collectivity that continues to reject nationalist ideology and the aesthetic forms with which it is associated.66 Many of them remain attached still (although much more reflectively and cautiously) to the possibility of a multi-ethnic, secular and united Bosnia and Herzegovina. Though this de-territorialised assembly often bemoans its minority status, it also possesses enormous cultural capital, skills, education, and control of a few key media outlets,67 which it occasionally uses to set the terms of public debate. Importantly, much of its post-war power continues to stem out of its alliance
Rites of Passage, in Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 93111. Not surprisingly, the leadership and membership of the currently most socially liberal party in the country Na#a Stranka to a large extent originated out of this milieu. It is interesting to note that although Radio ZID went off air in the late 1990s, its frequency, legal registration and legacy have been inherited by Radio Sarajevo. The station, which can be described as currently the most liberal media outlet in the country, is, in a similar way, dedicated to urban music, progressive aesthetic forms and cosmopolitan values. And it is also owned by Fabrika, the post-war enterprise of Bojan and Dada Had"ihalilovi!, who decided to help keep the ghost of Radio ZID and its message alive.

66 67

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with the international community and its various funding agencies, which provide important financial and political support to its initiatives and projects. In this stronghold of broadly construed opposition, countless are embittered, and hence find refuge in an unbending, sometimes even tone-deaf commitment to human rights and secular politics. They strongly favour antinationalist, multi-national and social democratic parties, even though they retain their unease with formal politics. Because they prefer to engage via NGOs and informal activist groups, they are, in some ways, destined to remain in the opposition. An outside observer may be tempted to call them Bosnia and Herzegovinas liberals, but to do so would be a simplification, even if their politics seem as idealistic as they did in the 1990s. Still, the continued existence of this political orientation despite the absence of institutions that would guard and promote it reveals the extent to which lived experience and shared habitus help move along processes of political subject formation. The future will show whether spectres of this time can help reinvent a new alternative politics.

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