Nationalist Partition and International Intervention - Essay Example

Sarajevo Blues The purpose of this essay is to explore the political nature of Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic. Sarajevo Blues is a book consisting of prose and poetry about the horrors of the Siege of Sarajevo, the siege of the capital city of Bosnia during the Bosnian-Herzegovina war of 1992. “It was first published at the end of 1992 as the first book in the Ljubljana (Slovenia) – based series Biblioteka ‘egzil-abc,’ which provided a forum for Bosnian writers and translators under siege. It was reprinted in an expanded edition in 1995, consists of small essays, prose vignettes, and poems all written in the first person and reflecting the terrible ordeal of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.” (Segel 267) The author of Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in 1960 in Bosnia. He contributed to cultural activities in Bosnia before he fled to the United States of America in 1996 along with his family to avoid the affects of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian war. Mehmedinovic claims that even though the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was broadcast extensively throughout the world, the perspective it portrayed was fairly limited due to political pressures. News on television, radio and in newspapers provided an incomplete, outside perspective on the war. Through his poems, essays and short stories in his book Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovic provides a new perspective on the war; a view from the inside. A political act is “an event that forever alters our assumptions about someone else’s experience” (Mehmendivoni). Therefore, politics refer to acts that people commit which have the ability to alter people’s perceptions about a state of affairs. It is a tool for manoeuvring people’s opinions and perceptions in a certain direction in order to fulfil some ulterior motive. Politics is capable of manipulating not only a person’s perception of the world but a person’s perception of himself/herself. Mehmedinovic is sceptical about political factors affecting mass media, which in turn affects the global population’s combined and individual thinking because it is the most popular means of distributing information about past and current affairs. Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s act of writing Sarajevo Blues can also be called politics because it has the ability to and is intended to change the perception of the masses about war. He aims to show people how the media alters the realities of war. Mehmedinovic is talking about the blues faced by the inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before the war and the nationalist movement, people from all different religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina as one nation. But after the nationalist movement, numerous war crimes were committed against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats by Radovan Karadzic. As Sylvia Dubery notes “He came to Sarajevo to study Comparative Literature and became involved in the city’s cultural scene of the 1980s. This was during the years of comparative prosperity and stability under the communist rule of Josip Tito, a period which Mehmedinovic has described as one of ‘urban ideology’. At this time he saw Bosnian culture as diverse and inclusive but that there as nonetheless a sense that people felt war inevitable. He produced a radio programme called the ‘Wasteland’ that suggests an uneasiness and discontent. During the war he saw Sarajevo as a synonym for Bosnia-Herzegovina but this was a time of great cultural productivity, during which he wrote his poetry collection ‘Sarajevo Blues’.” (5) Segel describes the writings in Sarajevo Blues as “poignant and grim, and in some cases convey a sense of disbelief that such a fate could befall the city and shatter the peace and good will among its inhabitants.” (267) Radovan Karadzic used to be a pleasant and amiable man. It is very difficult to believe that he could encourage violence and commit war crimes against the people of his own country, “yet in recalling the behavior of Karadzic (and others) during the student riots of 1968, Memedinovic could see that he had the makings of what he calls ‘the perfect errand-boy for Milosevic’s ‘nationalist-Stalinist project’ and recounts unspeakable acts of savagery perpetrated under the banner of Serbian nationalism.” (Segel, 267) The political nature of Mehmedinovic’s work is reflected by the anecdotes about Karadzic in Sarajevo Blues. For instance, “consider again the incisive accounts of Karadzic by Semezdin Mehmedinovic. Mehmedinovic recalls a conversation he had with Karadzic in Sarajevo before the war: We were in the Writer’s Club one summer afternoon and he was telling me, with great enthusiasm, about a movie he had seen the day before. The move was Sophie’s Choice, and Radovan, speaking from the professional perspective of someone concerned with the human psyche, interpreted in great detail the various aspects of Meryl Streep’s spiritual state in the scene where a German officer presents her with the following choice: which of her two children should be saved, since one would have to be killed. Underground, my hair stood on end as I remembered his rational analysis of Sophie’s choice. (1998, 19) Is Karadzic a person fascinated by evil? If he is a person fascinated with evil, at what point did he turn? Did Karadzic will evil rather than good? Mehmedinovic notes, ‘The ghastly scene from Sophie’s Choice was endlessly repeated in Bosnia: Karadzic’s soldiers put mothers in the same position in which Meryl Streep found herself in the cinematic reconstruction of events that took place in a German concentration camp’ (1998, 20). Is radical evil possible? Can a human being do evil knowing that it is evil? Is Karadzic an evil person or a person who does not know what he wants? How this question is answered influences the decisions of the international elite on whether, when, and how to apprehend Karadzic. If he is seen as evil, it may seem futile and vain to arrest him. If Karadzic is evil, he is incorrigible. What is the point of arresting him? It would change nothing; it could never undo what he did. The task can wait until he dies, when, of course, it would be pointless.” (Doubt 122-13) Sarajevo Blues not only attempts to provide a different point of view of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it also provides insight into the war crimes committed by Radovan Karadzic. The scariest part of it all is the fact that someone who lived in the same place, someone whom you met often could cause such destruction upon the city that was not alien to him. “The fact of the matter is that Karadzic, at that time and right up until before the war, was just an inconspicuous denizen of the city he would set out to destroy -- indistinguishable from his environment. In his brilliant essay on Karadzic (‘Stocking Hat’ in ‘Sarajevo Blues’), Semezdin Mehmedinovic writes about thumbing through a 1991-92 Sarajevo phone book and finding 21 entries under the family name Karadzic. In addition to Radovan, there were ‘10 Muslims, nine Serbs, and one Croat.’” (Hemon) Mehmedinovic recalls how the daily newspapers described a day as “relatively calm after [...] dozens of shells hit downtown proper, [...] and only a few have been killed or wounded” (Mehmedinovic 29) in ‘A Relatively Calm Day’. The absolute absurdity of this statement is highlighted by his extensive use of sarcasm. Indeed, there is nothing more catastrophic than the death and injury of innocent people. Media teaches us to believe that death and carnage is alright, as long as the number of casualties is less than that of the day before. He sheds light on the fact that among people across the globe, "[…] death has been accepted as a statistic" (Mehmedinovic 29). The sanctity of human life is devalued by the distorted information fed to the global population by the media. Media is a tool used to strip the masses of their humanity, to disconnect the global population from the reality and trauma of the horrid situation. During times of war, the media reports only the number of deaths, not the names of the deceased: 3,000 deaths yesterday, but only 250 deaths today. So, according to the news, it has been a relatively calm day because 2750 less people died today as compared to yesterday. By removing the faces and names of the victims of war, it becomes increasingly difficult for people on the outside to empathize with those on the inside and the barbaric ulterior motives of politics flourish. Apart from centring about Radovan Karadzic, Mehmedinovic’s work talked extensively about photographers and their role before and after the war; “Mehmedinovic recounts an anecdote about an exhibition of photographs by Mladen Pikulic, images which documented the destruction of Vukovar in December 1991, several months before the war in Bosnia began. The site of the exhibition is a café full of loud music, and of ‘dazed young bodies, huge stainless steel pitchers of beer and Coca-Cola […] Bloody syringes lie on the floor in the toilet’ (57). Suddenly: a young guy at one of the tables points to another young guy – the one in the picture crying before the background of Vukovar decimated by grenades – and says, in amazement: ‘He’s got the same sweater as me!’(57, translation modified) In this instance, unlike the photographers ‘who come from abroad to collect their fees from dailies, weeklies and art magazines by trading in death,’ a local photographer ‘made it possible for a junkie in a bar in Sarajevo to recognize […] that Sarajevo had already started wearing Vukovar’s sweater’ (57 – 8). The engagement which the Pikulic exhibition demonstrates is called Mehmedinovic ‘intellectual morality,’ a quality not necessarily more important than the partis pris of surgeons or of fire-fighters, but perhaps more rare, both in wartime and in peace. The author emphasizes that Sarajevan photographers were remarkable because, unlike most intellectuals, they refused to keep silent. His anecdote also demonstrates that they were especially noteworthy because, despite the stupor and stupidity of their public, they managed to make themselves heard.” (Kaplan and Ghosts 19-24) An important symbol used by Mehmedinovic is the Sarajevo rose. In his work, a young boy carries roses up a hill for selling them “to people visiting graves before the war, an action that is a sign of what to come. Later they are casually observed taped to the concrete at the roadside in ‘Zenica Blues;’ And you see bouquets of roses wrapped in cellophane held to the cold cement with scotch-tape. Look, that won’t last long, I say, just to make small talk. And she nods. As if she knows. (p.10) He does not say what she knows. Is it the tragedy of what is happening to the city, is it the impermanence of the tribute, or is it the inappropriateness of his casual comment, of words at a moment like this? Is it that she knows words can never be enough but that is all we can use to stop the silence from becoming too unbearable?”(Dubery 16) Perhaps she knows that the roses will not last forever because nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it is way of telling the readers that the war will not last forever but it is important to grasp the importance of different perspectives on the war. It is ironic how human beings believe that a piece of paper can protect them. “In Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovic remembers a man running across Sniper Alley, covering his head with the newspaper. It was touching, says Mehmedinovic, this comic gesture of a man warding off the sniper bullets with a few printed pages […] With snipers able to reach people anywhere at any time – on the street, at home in your bed – what protects you from being killed in Sarajevo or Grozny, or anywhere else for that matter, is no longer explicable either to the science of material density or to the laws of probability. No material is more or less bulletproof. No moment is more or less treacherous.” (Tumarkin 158-59) Perhaps the man covering his head with a newspaper symbolises seeking refuge in the media. It symbolises the futile efforts of the man to reach out to the world for help, but politics does not let the world help the man, instead, his death is treated as a statistic. References Bose, Sumantra. Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Parition and International Intervention. USA: Oxford University Press, 2002. Doubt, Keith. Understanding Evil: lessons from Bosnia. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Dubery, Sylvia. “Words Watching into the Stillness, Remembrance and Forgetting in Sarajevo.” Manchester Jean Monnent Centre of Excellence Yearbook 2008. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2008. Hemon, Aleksander. It's Time to Test the Karadzic Myth. Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. 13 May 2010 . Kaplan, RD. and Ghosts, B. “Voice and Ventriloquism in the Representation of Sarajevo.” Postmodern Culture 2(2002): 19 – 24. Mehmedinovic, Semezdin. Sarajevo Blues. Trans. Ammiel Alacalay. San Francisco: City Lights, 1998. Segal, Harold B. The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Tumarkin, Maria M. Traumascapes : the power and fate of places transformed by tragedy, Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University press, 2005. Read More