The siege of Sarajevo began in April 1992 and lasted for 1,425 days, making it the longest siege in European history. Intensive shelling and sniper fire over that time killed more than ten thousand inhabitants and left the Bosnian capital largely in ruins. This chapter analyses commemoration of the siege as a key site for memory politics and one that has wider implications for the quality of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After nearly three decades of uneasy peace, Bosnian society is defined by unresolved tensions and a deeply divisive political climate centred around incompatible narratives as to who was a victim and who was a perpetrator. The memorialisations of many of the gravest atrocities of the war, such as the genocide in Srebrenica, tend to feed into such dichotomies. In many ways the memory politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina follows the same logic as that of Cyprus, with separatist understandings of the past serving to maintain divisions in the present. However, the mnemonic formation of the siege of Sarajevo is relatively unsettled; the several contestations of the dominant ethno-nationalist understanding of peace that have emerged there make it a very interesting case to study for the purposes of this book.

As outlined in the Introduction, a mnemonic formation is a topic of particular salience around which sites, agents, narratives and events gather. Analysing the mnemonic formation of the siege renders visible frictional lines and contentions, and thus deepens our understanding of how these shifting dynamics bring with them possibilities for transformation. This chapter shows that elite institutions and political agents use commemoration of the siege as a means for exclusionist nation-building through efforts to ‘re-remember’ the siege through a militaristic, ethno-nationalist lens that focuses on dichotomous positionalities of ‘us’ as victims and the ‘others’ as perpetrators. Nevertheless, the mnemonic formation is by no means stable, as memory activists have resisted the ethno-nationalist rhetoric. Independent curators, artists, tourism entrepreneurs and other agents have produced narratives about the resilience shown by civilians and their defence of multi-ethnic values and practices. They argue that the siege was an attack on universal values of humanity, and they insist on telling everyday stories of what it was like to live through the daily danger and hunger of those years.

This focus on the siege as the topic under analysis highlights a particular phenomenon of warfare and its concomitant memorialisation, namely urbicide. Urbicide is a particular form of political violence that seeks to destroy urbanity, defined as conditions that enable heterogeneity as an existential quality of life (Coward, 2008). Urbicide entails the destruction of urbanity through, for example, targeting the public buildings and spaces that make such heterogeneity possible. Urbicide is not only, or even foremost, an attack on material infrastructure in a defined territory; it is above all an attack on the social texture and human plurality generated through people interacting in a shared urban space (Folin and Porfyriou, 2020). The civilian lived experience of urbicide is thus anchored in the mundane realm, a realm that may not so easily lend itself to formalised commemoration with single-focus messages. This chapter understands the siege of 1992–1996 as having been a form of urbicide, and examines how the dignity of survivors can be recognised through mnemonic activities and sites that encompass the entanglement of multiple memories of tangible and intangible losses caused by this particular form of violence. A focus on the mnemonic formation of the siege of Sarajevo thus brings insights that are clearly of relevance as we investigate what a just peace entails.

The Bosnian war and post-war challenges

When the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed in the early 1990s, it set off a wave of extreme violence and warfare across its constituent republics. These wars were driven by leaders and elites who embraced aggressive ideologies with the aim of creating ethnically homogenous, independent states. Their politics were embraced by large parts of the population, which often had both economic grievances and memories of previous violence based on ethnic and religious differences during the Second World War. That earlier violence had been followed by decades of enforced silences that prevented discussion of it. The aggressive political moves by leaders and elites had devastating consequences across much of the territory of the former Yugoslavia, with the war in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the epicentre of violence. The war there broke out following a referendum on 29 February 1992 to decide whether the new republic should declare independence or not. The result, in favour of independence, was rejected by the Bosnian Serbs who instead supported the idea of a ‘Greater Serbia’. The Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić and supported by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević and the Yugoslav People’s Army, mobilised their forces and began fighting against the newly formed Bosnian army. The war soon spread across the country; eventually fighting would also break out between Bosnian forces and Bosnian Croat forces – whose leadership likewise envisioned a ‘homeland’ for their own community (Donia, 2006; Malcolm, 1996).

In terms of demographics, Bosnia and Herzegovina is made up of people from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, a factor that has had a strong influence over its identity and history. Within Yugoslavia, it was designated a federal unit, as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and no one group had an absolute majority. Its population was a multi-ethnic mix, with (Bosnian Muslim) Bosniaks as the largest group, followed by Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats (Moll, 2015a).¹ It therefore represented ‘a contradiction of the logic of nationalism’ (Bringa, 1995: 33). The ethno-nationalist war, on the other hand, sought to separate out ethnic groups and create ethnic homogeneity within designated territories (Donia, 2006: 290). Horrific methods were used to pursue this vision. At least 100,000 people were killed and over 2.2 million displaced (Tokača, 2012) in a war of massive destruction. Civilians were targeted in a drive to ‘cleanse’ villages and towns of those deemed undesirable. People were killed and forced to flee, thousands of women were raped in camps set up for that purpose, tens of thousands of men and women were kept in detention camps where they underwent torture (including sexual violence), towns were shelled and besieged for months and years, and more than 70 per cent of all private homes were destroyed, as well as a very large part of the cultural heritage and infrastructure (e.g. Bassiouni, 1994; Donia, 2006; Stiglmayer, 1994). In the final months of the war, the country became the site for the first genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. The ad hoc UN tribunal set up for addressing war crimes, the International Criminal Tribunal of Former Yugoslavia, would later rule that genocide had been committed in and around the town of Srebrenica, with more than eight thousand men and boys killed and executed in a matter of a few days. The key figures of Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić and Bosnian Serb army leader Ratko Mladić were sentenced for genocide, as well as for crimes against humanity for the siege of Sarajevo and other deeds.²

The atrocities in Srebrenica led to an intervention by NATO and following its targeted bombing of the Bosnian Serb Army, the fighting stopped (Holbrooke, 1998). A US-brokered peace agreement, known as the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), was signed in December 1995. It confirmed the ethnically based lines that resulted from the war and a complex system was created for consociational power-sharing between the constituent groups in order for peace to be accepted by all parties. The DPA thus divided the country, to be formally known as the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina, into two semi-autonomous entities: the Republika Srpska, which is dominated by Bosnian Serbs, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is subdivided into ten cantons and is dominated by Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats.³ In addition, the city of Brčko is a self-governing district. There is a system of ethnic checks and balances in place within all political organisations and even beyond. The presidency of the country is three-headed and must include a Bosniak, a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Croat.⁴

The construction of peace is thus built upon the same logic of ethnic divisionism as the war, and the ethno-political centrifugal powers of the war are continued by other means, as ethno-nationalist agents benefit from a political framework that emphasises the protection of group interests and identities (Bose, 2002; Donia, 2006). For example, the Bosnian Serb member of the tripartite presidency, Milorad Dodik, has repeatedly blocked the formation of a central government and his outspoken goal is full independence for Republika Srpska.⁵ Further, the process of addressing war crimes is slow and partial; nearly ten thousand people are still missing and mass graves continue to be found with some frequency (Dzaferovic, 2021). The economic situation is dire and the social fabric has been irrefutably changed by the large displacements of people through so-called ethnic cleansing (Kondylis, 2010). The political situation is further complicated by the fact that the country is still under partial international control, as the massive international peace intervention included both a military and a civilian component. The Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR), an ad hoc diplomatic body created under the DPA and in line with UN resolutions, is in charge of overseeing the implementation of civilian aspects of the accords. The OHR has extensive powers and can impose laws if the legislative bodies of the country refuse to do so in breach of the agreement.⁶

Bosnia and Herzegovina is thus in the present day a fragmented and divided society, and this is strongly in evidence in its politics of memory. The country and its inhabitants are split between several conflicting stories of the past and there is little agreement as to who was a perpetrator and who was a victim, what actually happened or why.

The Bosnian memoryscape

Bosnian memory politics has been the subject of several studies that discuss how its fractured nature is a result of the mass killings and forced transfers of population as well as the subsequent ethnic reorganisation of the country (Bădescu et al., 2021; Božić, 2017). One factor often stressed in explaining the persistence of divisions is the fact that the state-level administration of the reconstituted Bosnia and Herzegovina is more or less absent from the field of cultural heritage, leading to a construction of memory and identity ‘within a particular and potentially exclusivist perspective’, as noted by Stevens and Musi (2015: 67). Legislative decisions about monuments and memorials are taken at the local political and administrative level, which means that the memoryscape is spatially defined as ‘part of renationalization policies … focusing on dividing memories, values and practices’ (Dragićević Šešić cited in Musi, 2021: 56, emphasis in original). While earlier studies of Bosnian everyday life pointed to the dangers of a ‘reduction of Bosnian realities to its ethnic dimensions’ (Bougarel et al, 2007: 13), decades of excluding memory politics have in fact reified simplified stories of the past. Opposing narratives exist side by side in this small state, upheld by mnemonic cycles that celebrate different commemorative days, using different flags. Streets are renamed to celebrate military heroes, figures regarded by others as war criminals, and schools teach three different curricula (Moll, 2015a). The genocide in Srebrenica has understandably attracted a lot of scholarly interest, including around what role the commemoration of the genocide in Srebrenica plays in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond (e.g. Duijzings, 2007; Fridman, 2022; Jacobs, 2017; Nettelfield and Wagner, 2014). It is the most visible commemorative event in the country, with tens of thousands of people taking part every year, travelling to the burial site in Potočari outside Srebrenica, which is located in Republika Srpska. In Republika Srpska, in contrast, the genocide is actively denied and, for example, high schools and streets have been named after the imprisoned war criminals Karadžić and Mladić, who are serving life sentences for the genocide.⁷

Overall, the victimhood narrative is very strong on all sides and mnemonic claims about victim exclusivity are made by all (Barkan and Bećirbašić, 2015; see Demirel, 2023). No politician in power in Bosnia and Herzegovina has worked actively for reconciliation, and there has been no truth commission beyond important but still limited civil society initiatives (Moll, 2015a; Touquet and Vermeersch, 2016).

Further, research on Bosnian memory politics points to a temporal fracturing of memory in addition to the spatial fracturing of memory. Temporal fracturing is brought about by the fact that generations remember differently, as the older generation was born into socialist Yugoslavia and can experience a disconnect with younger generations who know little about that period (Maćek, 2018; Palmberger, 2016). Young people coming of age today have no personal memories of the war of the 1990s, and many in the generation that lived through it keep silent about their experiences, often motivated by a desire to ‘protect the young’. Stories of a multi-ethnic past tend to be downplayed in the face of increasingly homogenised ethno-nationalist collective identities (Eastmond and Mannergren Selimovic, 2012).

In contrast, as will be discussed, a number of mnemonic activities do challenge such spatial and temporal breaks. So, while the centrifugal powers tending towards division remain strong, the upholding of ethno-nationalist memory spheres is nevertheless a contingent and unstable undertaking. The dichotomy between us as victims and them as perpetrators is destabilised through social relations that continue across space and time, as many people continue to navigate and be part of webs of relations that cross ethnic boundaries. The multiple layers of Bosnian society – including class, rural–urban identities and gender to name but a few – mean that moral categories often do not follow ethno-nationalist logic (Bougarel et al., 2007: 2). While the war left a legacy of major demographic changes, interrelational practices across ethnic boundaries are still in evidence in Sarajevo, where the urban fabric of the capital city has been woven through centuries of religious and ethnic interaction.

Mnemonic formation: the siege of Sarajevo

Surrounded by steep, green hills, the silhouette of Sarajevo reflects a history shaped by the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two world wars and a socialist state. The cityscape includes mosques, synagogues, Serb-Orthodox churches and Catholic churches. Elegantly decorated Ottoman bazaars nestle next to grand, nineteenth-century buildings that evoke the Austro-Hungarian period, while vast concrete housing estates are evidence of the more recent socialist past. No wonder that the city has captured the imagination of people across the world, and that many Sarajevans themselves have related to this multi-cultural heritage as a matter of pride, expressing a deep sense of identity as Sariljelje (Stefansson, 2007). When the war broke out, this identity would come under vicious attack. The Bosnian war had just begun in April 1992 when the Yugoslav National Army and Bosnian Serb forces belonging to the newly proclaimed Republika Srpska initiated a blockade that would last for four years. The mixed urbanscape of about 400,000 inhabitants was transformed into a giant prison. Several hundred mortar shells a day were fired from the green hills surrounding the city (Bassiouni, 1994). People were shot at every day, living under terror of snipers and shelling. People engaged in mundane practices were ‘moving targets’ (Ristic, 2018: 51) as streets, tram stops, schoolyards and markets became danger zones. The insides of homes were not safe either as bullets and shrapnel tore through living rooms. UNICEF estimated that of the approximately 70,000 children living in the city during the period nearly half had been shot at and had witnessed one or more family members killed, and nearly all had spent time in underground shelters. In addition to the approximately 10,000 people killed, an additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children (Bassiouni, 1994).

Throughout the siege there was a desperate shortage of food and Sarajevo residents relied on humanitarian aid mainly delivered through (insufficient) airlifts by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). People went out foraging for weeds and snails to eat. The trees in the parks were felled to be used for heating and cooking. Getting water meant queuing for hours at pumps, in grave danger of being shot at (FAMA, 1993; Maček, 2009). One of the harshest aspects of siege life was the rupture of communications with the outer world as telecommunications and the postal system broke down, and many survivors have testified to the feeling of ‘living in a cage’. In the words of Jasenko Selimović, a writer who lived through the first year of the siege, the aim of the aggressors was not to take over the city; the point was to humiliate people and make them lose their dignity (Selimović, 2020). In response, the city’s inhabitants displayed resilience and ingenuity in protesting the urbicide. Cultural expressions symbolically transmitted the pain, as for example when the musician Vedran Smailović played Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G Minor’ in the ruined National Library and during burials in makeshift graveyards.⁸ The images of ‘the cellist of Sarajevo’ have become emblematic for their insistence on human dignity in the face of violence. The attackers also targeted the city’s cultural and social memories in their material form. Some of the buildings that represented the city’s key institutions were destroyed, including the National and University Library Vijećnica, whose library of 1.5 million volumes was burnt to ashes (today the renovated building is used as City Hall), the Houses of Parliament and the building of the city’s main newspaper, Oslobodjenje. Overall, it is estimated that about a third of all buildings were damaged or destroyed (Bassiouni, 1994). This violence against physical architecture and infrastructure, public spaces, streets and squares had both symbolic and material consequences for the sense of urbanity (Maćek, 2018).

When the siege officially ended on 6 January 1996, large parts of Sarajevo were in ruins and it had gone through some dramatic population shifts. In addition to the thousands of refugees who had fled the city, most of Sarajevo’s Serbs had left for the newly formed entity of Republika Srpska. The dividing line between Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was drawn through greater Sarajevo, with the semi-rural municipalities on the city’s eastern periphery designated ‘Serb Sarajevo’. Nowadays this area is known as East Sarajevo and, with its own municipal structure, no longer looks to Sarajevo administratively. Many people born in East Sarajevo since the siege have never visited Sarajevo itself and have been brought up with a school curriculum that does not acknowledge the siege; memorial events celebrating Bosnian Serb leaders and victims are held regularly in East Sarajevo, in a mirrored, opposing reflection of the commemorations held in the city itself (e.g. Bădescu, 2015; Jansen, 2013). However, the particular memory politics of this area will not be discussed in this chapter, as the geographical area of East Sarajevo never came under siege.

Overall, Sarajevo emerged from the war as a far more segregated and politicised post-war space; it was now a contested, divided city with changed demographics. Its present spatial division influences people’s actions as they navigate their way through the city, whether upholding or attempting to transform segregation (Jansen, 2013; Kappler, 2017; see Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 93). The war in many ways feels distant in present-day Sarajevo, with its lively café terraces and office buildings of blue-tinted glass, but material remnants from the siege are ever-present. The tell-tale signs of extreme violence include ruined buildings that have yet to be rebuilt, apartment houses chipped by bullets or mortar shells, and gaping holes in the cityscape where a building once stood. There are also the makeshift cemeteries of the war years, when parks became burial grounds, and here and there in the residential areas one comes across the word sklonište, ‘shelter’, painted on a building. More subtly, material remnants still circulate in the daily life of the city, from bullet cases sold as keyrings to tourists hunting for war souvenirs, to sheets of UNHCR plastic used to patch up a backyard shed. There are also things and material places that are unmarked but which still hold affective and silent meaning for individuals; sites that bear no visible wounds but are forever connected to the war years in the minds of residents (Jansen, 2013; Mannergren Selimovic, 2021). The post-war city itself is thus in a sense an affective locale, as inhabitants and visitors move through today’s cityscape and their actions activate the traces of war manifested in the scarred surface of the city.

Just as the violence of the siege ripped through and scarred the urban fabric, peacetime memorialisation of the siege also makes its own marks and shapes the city discursively, relationally and materially; it consequently also shapes the quality of peace. It is to this on-going memory work that we now turn to investigate the shifting terrain of the memory work carried out around the siege.

Sites: competing claims to the urban space

The sites in Sarajevo that we focus on in this analysis have been selected on the basis of a careful mapping of the whole city, and they have emerged from this as especially noteworthy and consolidated nodes in the on-going mnemonic formation of the siege. In the analysis in this chapter they are sorted into three categories based on their material manifestations in the cityscape. The first category comprises street memorials and plaques placed in the cityscape as markers at ‘authentic sites’, meaning the physical places where atrocities occurred. The second category is prominent and meaning-making memorials and monuments regarding the siege that have been constructed at various spots in the city. The third category comprises the three museums that deal specifically with the siege. This analysis is based upon repeated fieldwork carried out in Sarajevo over the last decade and also draws on the careful mapping of the city’s memorial sites by Musi (2014, 2021) and Ristic (2018).

Importantly, these sites are understood as nodes in the living fabric of the post-war city – a city that itself is an ‘authentic site’, as the numerous scars on the cityscape testify. We need to bear this ever-changing memoryscape in mind when approaching the more formal sites of memorialisation, that is, the monuments, memorials and museums. As will be discussed, while the material sites in a sense pin down meaning, our analysis shows that the meanings constructed at these sites have shifted and developed over time, as mnemonic agents engage with them in various ways, eliciting sometimes conflicting narratives from them and using them for both memorialisation and counter-memorialisation events. In this sense the memoryscape emerges as fragmented, with the dominant ethno-nationalist understanding of the war in some ways growing in visibility in the city, yet often challenged by contending, more pluralist understandings.

Street memorials and plaques: the power of the ‘authentic site’

Someone strolling through the city will come across a number of plaques that mark authentic sites of particularly gruesome events during the war. These plaques have been commissioned through the Sarajevo Canton Assembly and give an indication of what the dominant political powers seek to emphasise. While unobtrusive in the sense that they are easy to pass by without always being noticed, they convey an unequivocal message. The wording on each plaque follows more or less the same formula: ‘At this place Serb criminals on [the date] killed [the number] citizens of Sarajevo,’ signed ‘the Citizens of Sarajevo’. Sometimes these brief sentences are complemented with a list of names of individuals killed at the particular spot. One such plaque is found at the Markale open market in the centre of town, where on two occasions shelling took many lives (‘on 5 February 1994, 66 people were killed and 197 wounded, and on 28 August 1995, 43 people were killed and 84 were wounded’). Another plaque bearing similar wording has been placed on the building of the reconstructed National Library Vijećnica (now City Hall). The explicit mentions of ethnicity on the plaques inscribes an ethno-nationalist reading onto the war and obscures the fact that victims of the siege included many Sarajevans of Serb ethnic origin.

Another plaque is found at one of the many bridges that stitch the city together across the narrow Miljacka river. It was on this bridge that the first civilians were killed in the war. On 5 April 1992 about 100,000 citizens gathered outside parliament in a peace rally to protest against the impending military threat. Serb forces were step by step tightening their encirclement of the city. When the protesters marched across the bridge the first shots rang out, killing two young women, twenty-three-year-old Suada Dilberović and thirty-four-year-old Olga Sučić (Malcolm, 1996). They were civilians belonging to different ethnicities, and would become symbols of the courage of peaceful protesters in the face of tanks and guns. The bridge is thus an authentic site that holds a central meaning in the history of the siege and of the war at large. It has been renamed the Suada and Olga Bridge, with a plaque marking the space in their honour. While the wording on this plaque is less blunt than on the above-mentioned plaques, the message is certainly not one of peace and co-existence. The poetic, nationalism-tinged text reads, ‘A drop of my blood flowed. And Bosnia did not dry up,’ framing the deaths as directly linked to the survival of the independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and thereby obscuring the fact that the demonstration was for peace in a broad sense; it had no nationalist or patriotic agenda (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2016a). The bridge is in fact also famous for another horrific event. It was here that a young couple, Boško Brkić and Admira Ismić, were killed when trying to escape the besieged city. Photographs of the two university students – who were likewise of different ethnic backgrounds – dying in each other’s arms spread across the world, turning a personal tragedy into one of the emblematic images of the war as they were dubbed the ‘Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo’. After the war, the couple was commemorated with a plaque which at some point was removed. There are several stories about why this happened. A common explanation is that the multi-ethnic love story was judged not suitable in the increasingly ethno-nationalist climate of the post-war era, as will be explicated later in the chapter in relation to the more cosmopolitan narrative about the siege.

The meaning of this particular site has thus been negotiated and changed over the years. Entangled memories at this spot are pulled in various directions, which illustrates a more general tendency in the memoryscape towards an ethnification of memory that links one group – the Serbs – to a collective perpetrator identity while excluding them from victimhood. However, the most recent marking of another authentic site in the city points to a shift in this respect. In November 2021 the Sarajevo City Council raised a memorial stone at the Kazani ravine, located on Mount Trebević just outside the city. It commemorates some of the victims of Mušan ‘Caco’ Topalović, a criminal turned commander of a notorious unit in the Bosnian army of the early 1990s that tortured and murdered civilians, mostly those of Serb origin. Some of their victims were dumped in a mass grave in the Kazani ravine. Over the years, relatives, victims’ associations and others have demanded that the victims be accorded recognition and commemorated. Finally, the memorial stone was raised. In contrast to the plaques initiated by the Sarajevo Canton Assembly in the city centre, there is, however, no mention of who was responsible for the killings. The fact that they were committed by a unit of the Bosnian army is ignored, an omission that has sparked further controversy, leading to political protests and activists boycotting the ceremony at which the memorial stone was unveiled (Dzaferagic, 2021). Through the official commemoration of the Kazani killings, the victim–perpetrator dichotomy has been destabilised, in so far as Bosnian Serb Sarajevans may now also be recognised as victims. But there is – at the time of writing – no willingness to open up the perpetrator identity to include Bosniaks and the Bosnian army.

So far then, we can see that the authentic sites have to a large degree been harnessed to ethnic imaginations. But this is not the full story. What is arguably the most moving type of authentic site markers in the city offers an alternative, more pluralist spatial message. The attentive wanderer will soon notice an occasional red floral pattern in the concrete of pavements, on streets or squares. The patterns are known as Sarajevo Roses and are in fact the splattered scars left by mortar shells and grenades; these marks have been filled with resin and then painted red. There are about a hundred such roses all over the city and while the red splashes are hard to miss, they are at the same time unobtrusive. As such, they belong to the same category of pavement memorials as the so-called stumbling stones that mark the homes of Jews murdered in the Holocaust in cities across Europe and Russia; they are an organic part of the urbanscape and seek to ‘transform the largely instrumental practice of walking into an encounter with urban history’ (Stevens and Ristic, 2015: 274). Like the stumbling stones, the Sarajevo Roses remain open to interpretation, as you may walk across them obliviously, notice them for a fleeting second in the course of your shopping, or you may stop for a moment of remembrance without explicitly seeking out a specific area designed for commemoration. They heal the torn fabric of the city by smoothing out the craters, making the pavement possible to walk on again. At the same time, they keep the wound open, as the red colour of the roses reminds passers-by of the blood spilt on the very site of the crater, thus refusing to allow the suffering and death of Sarajevans to fall into oblivion. As we shall discuss, they have a history linked to agents of memory activism.

Figure 3.1Sarajevo Rose outside the Tunnel Museum (photograph by Johanna Mannergren, February 2018)

Memorial sites: military heroes and civilian suffering

A very different approach is taken at the most prestigious memorial site in the capital, the Martyrs’ Memorial in the Kovači cemetery. The institutional fund that manages most of the commemoration sites in Sarajevo Canton is the Fund of Sarajevo Canton for the Protection and Maintenance of Cemeteries for Shahids and Killed Veterans, Memorials Centres and Monuments for the Victims of Genocide (Fond Memorijala for short).⁹ Situated in the central neighbourhood of Kovači, the cemetery is considered to be the oldest burial ground in Sarajevo, possibly dating from the fourteenth century (Musi, 2014). In 1964 it was turned into a park and a sports centre, before the war brought it back into use as a burial ground. The 1,487 graves it contains make it the country’s largest burial ground for soldiers who died in the 1992–1995 war. It also contains the grave of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first president, Alija Izetbegović, who led the country through the war years, as well as the grave of the chief of staff of the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. The complex includes an amphitheatre, an auditorium and a Wall of Memory with names. A recent addition to the site is the small Liberation War Heroes Museum, opened in April 2019, which celebrates the lives of nine Bosnian army soldiers who lost their lives in the war and who are designated heroes worthy of special honour. This memorial is intimately linked to mnemonic work to consolidate the Bosnian post-war state and to frame the state’s existence in terms of liberation rhetoric, as demonstrated by a quote from Izetbegović that adorns his tomb: ‘We swear to God that we shall not be slaves.’ The site further engages with the dimension of religious identity through the use of Muslim symbolism, including the use of the word shahid (martyr), traditional tombstones (nišan) as well as other symbols such as a memorial pool in the shape of a half crescent, and so on.

Under one of the nišan tombstones rests the controversial figure Mušan Topalović, known as ‘Caco’, already mentioned above. The memorial stone at the Kazani ravine and Caco’s grave at Kovači cemetery are not geographically far from each other. It makes sense that the relatives of the Kazani victims are still dissatisfied, as there is no admittance of guilt; the perpetrator is on the contrary honoured as a hero at his own site of burial.

Although the Kovači cemetery is centrally located next to the historical centre of town (Baščaršija), it is not a site you might come across accidentally, as you might with the Memorial to Children Killed in the Siege of Sarajevo. The Children’s Memorial was erected in a central square next to a shopping centre and has quickly become part of the city’s profile and is well visited. It was inaugurated in 2009 by the Sarajevo Canton in cooperation with the Association of Parents of Children Killed in the Siege of Sarajevo. It consists of an abstract sculpture of green glass rising out of the centre of a fountain. Beside it are seven cylinders of aluminium bearing the names of 521 children. The cylinders can be twirled round so that the names can be touched and traced with your fingers, inviting the passer-by to engage in a tactile way with the monument. On the edge of the fountain are shapes of footprints left by siblings of the children killed. It has been suggested that this monument, created by sculptor Mensud Keco, conjures up images of children playing in the sand, building sandcastles, or the abstract forms of a mother sheltering her child. The water lapping across the footprints brings to mind both the vulnerability of life as well as the eternity of memory.¹⁰ In this sense, the monument is highly symbolic and works with affect to communicate its message about the innocence of child victims. Nevertheless, at the time the memorial was built it was a subject of heated debate, especially around whether it represented all the children who had been killed or solely children within those areas of the city that had been under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces, hence excluding children killed in adjacent areas – mainly what has now become East Sarajevo in Republika Srpska and some other neighbourhoods that were under Serb occupation during the war. Critics argue that this exclusion, if that is what it is, implies that some children were less innocent than others (Musi, 2021). Thus, it can be argued that even the death of children is ethno-nationalistically commemorated. The debate seems to have lost its heat over recent years, as the monument has gradually become emblematic of the city and is now a common stop on tourist itineraries.

Some memorial sites have been created with artistic ambitions. In general, the art scene in Sarajevo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a lively one, and a number of artists have made their marks locally and globally with works dealing with themes linked to memory and loss. The permanent, material imprints have so far been few, however, as artists have often worked with installations and other more temporary interventions in the cityscape. The few artistic monuments that have been installed permanently add a different tone to the memoryscape: more confrontational and often using irony as a tool. One of special interest to commemorations of the siege was produced as part of a project entitled ‘De/Construction of Monument’ that the Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art organised in the mid-2000s (Ristic, 2018: 191–2). This work by Nebojša Šerić Šoba stands on the city’s main avenue, close to the History Museum. Known as the Canned Beef Monument, it is a scaled-up tin can of the kind that contained the low-quality food airlifted into the city during the siege. It bears the words ‘Canned Beef’ in English, with a sarcastic inscription below on its plinth: ‘Monument to the International Community, from the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo’. This is especially pertinent as the international community at the same time as sending food was enforcing an arms embargo, thus making it impossible for the city to defend itself. Hence, the ‘grateful’ inscription is doubly sarcastic (see Kappler, 2017: 8; Ristic, 2018: 195–6; Sheftel, 2012). The monument thus functions as a remembrance act regarding the inept gestures and the passivity of the international community, as well as a recognition of the hunger suffered by the Sarajevans. The fact that the artist chooses not to engage with the ethnic dimensions of the conflict, instead focusing on the urbicide and its transnational dimensions, is a statement in itself.

Museums: military heroism versus civilian everyday resistance

The third category of sites in this mapping comprises three Sarajevo museums: The Tunnel of Hope Museum, the Historical Museum and the War Childhood Museum. Each engages with the siege in a different way, but all three permanent exhibitions demand an active engagement from the visitor in ways that the markers and monuments in the open urbanscape do not (see Mannergren Selimovic, 2022b). They do this primarily through the display of objects, and thus we move our focus from more symbolic representations to material remnants and artefacts that can be seen, touched and experienced at a more visceral level.

The Tunnel of Hope Museum is actually partly an authentic site, partly a designed museum. The museum is centred around a reconstructed part of a tunnel that was built by the Bosnian army as an artery out of the besieged city and was used to transport weapons, food and other supplies. It was also used to help the severely injured out of the city. The tunnel, 1.5 metres in height and about one metre in width, ran for approximately 960 metres under the airport before ending in a private house on the outskirts of the city, at what used to be the frontline.¹¹ The house is severely damaged, and by its entrance a Sarajevo Rose marks one of the worst grenade hits during the siege, which killed dozens of people. About 15 metres of the tunnel have been reconstructed, offering the visitor a chance to crouch down and get the tactile, often claustrophobic experience of moving through the enclosed space. There is also an auditorium where footage from the siege and from the tunnel is shown, as well as exhibits of objects and artefacts related to the tunnel. There is an ambivalence in this exhibition between a focus on the military defence of the city and sufferings of civilians. The museum came into being as an act of activism by the Kolar family, who owned the house, turned the site into a museum and took care of it for fifteen years without any government support.¹² Some years ago, Fond Memorijala took over responsibility for it, although the owner of the house continues to act as director of the museum.

While the Tunnel of Hope Museum is by far the most visited museum in the city, and is highlighted as a must-see on tour operators’ itineraries, the city’s most comprehensive exhibition about the siege is actually found at the History Museum. The museum was built in the Yugoslav era in order to tell ‘the history of antifascism during World War II and the cultivation of socialist state values’,¹³ but this focus has been overlaid by a new permanent exhibition concerning the siege. In this exhibition, the museum is evidently seeking to rectify dominant ethno-nationalist narratives by focusing on citizens’ resilience and the individual and social cost of war. It does this from a position that can only be described as a counter-position, taking a stand against the divisive memory politics that prevail elsewhere at all political and administrative levels. This content appears to be the reason why it is starved of funding. For an outsider to Bosnian politics this situation, for a state institution, may seem somewhat surprising, but just like several art institutions that operate at the state level, the History Museum does not get any long-term funding. This reflects political paralysis at the state level regarding memory politics, as decision-makers are drawn from both the Republika Srpska and the Federation, with their divergent historical narratives. The museum hence mostly survives on small allocations of funding handed out on a yearly or even monthly basis. The lack of funding is manifested in the fact that the museum has not yet been properly renovated. The modernist-style building is situated on the broad avenue that was nicknamed ‘Snipers’ Alley’ during the war and was badly damaged by incessant shelling. With its budget not stretching to heating, in wintertime a raw chill pervades the building.

On its website the museum states that its aim is to tell the story ‘about the persistence, resourcefulness and creativity of Sarajevans, who lived 1,335 days without electricity, water, heating’.¹⁴ Entering the exhibition area, the visitor is confronted by an abundance of objects and photos relating to everyday life under siege. There are staged reconstructions of, for example, a kitchen. The familiar situation of making a family dinner is easily recognisable, except that the details are skewed: the window is replaced by plastic provided by the UNHCR; dinner includes a tin of donated food aid that is to be cooked on a stove made up of parts of a can and a roof gutter. Close by, a bicycle leaning against a wall is loaded with the plastic canisters that were used to collect water. In addition to these references to very concrete experiences through simple but powerful displays, the museum provides space for temporary art exhibitions that address the memories of the siege in various ways.

Figure 3.2Swing on display at the War Childhood Museum (photograph courtesy of the War Childhood Museum)

The building that houses the History Museum is a testimony to the material damage caused by shelling and as such it is yet another authentic site in the urbanscape. In contrast, the recently constructed War Childhood Museum offers an entirely different experience, with the sleekness of its grey surfaces closely reflecting international trends in museum architecture. This independent museum, mostly funded by international donors, came into being through a call put out on social media by its director, Jasminko Halilović, in a move of social activism. Halilović, who spent his childhood in the besieged city, started a website where he asked a simple question: ‘What was a war childhood for you?’ After thousands of people shared their stories and donated objects from their childhoods, Halilović came up with the idea of a museum that would display these objects. They are the most ordinary things which formed part of many childhoods – a game of Monopoly, a diary, a Sony Walkman – each presented alongside a personal story told by its owner. Through the objects, and the stories that accompany them, the museum aims to portray how everyday life was for a child or teenager during the siege.¹⁵

To summarise, these three museums all provide spaces for engagement with objects and material markers of the siege that hold affective power generated by their authenticity. Some of them are strange to see in peacetime, such as a stove made from debris or an improvised stretcher used to carry the wounded through the ‘tunnel of hope’. Others are shocking in their very ordinariness, such as the Monopoly board, and are therefore painfully relatable. All of them have the power to make us feel the past (see Buckley-Zistel, 2021; Mannergren Selimovic, 2022b).

In the above analysis, based on the mapping of the key mnemonic sites commemorating the siege of Sarajevo, a memoryscape emerges that shows a number of temporal shifts in meaning at the sites. These shifts are further explored in the next section, which investigates the role of mnemonic agents.

Agents: from institutions to activists

Agency is about power and the capacity to act, and this section maps the key agents who are involved in bringing the mnemonic formation of the siege into being. They include commemoration institutions, international political bodies and donors, curators, activists, artists and tourism entrepreneurs. In addition, the discussion in this chapter adds a crucial element to the analysis concerning the interventions and engagements of ordinary people, who have no set agenda and do not belong to any formal collective, but who seek individual recognition of their personal memories and objects of remembrance in various settings.

The influence of memory agents in the context of Sarajevo ranges from that of powerful hegemonic elite agents to the different kind of influence of those operating as grassroots organisations and/or taking up positions of opposition and protest. Further, one can see that many traverse local, national and transnational scales as they link up with various networks of memory agents. Another interesting aspect of the role of memory agents is derived from the sheer physical proximity created by the topography of the urbanscape, which makes agents without formal power more visible as they act in public spaces and intervene in the memoryscape, albeit fleetingly. In the analysis of the mnemonic formation of the siege, certain categories of agents have emerged as of particular interest: the political and institutional agents as they control the formal politics of memory; the counter-agents who work in less formal spaces such as museums, civil society and art; ordinary citizens who engage with memorialisation activities; and tourism entrepreneurs and tourists, who play an important role in making certain sites visible and meaningful in the city.

Political and institutional agents: promoting and resisting ethno-nationalist yearnings

Fond Memorijala and the Sarajevo Canton have so far in this analysis emerged as key elite agents active at several of the sites analysed in the previous sections. When it comes to the formal monuments and memorials, most decisions are taken at the level of canton; Fond Memorijala, as a cantonal institution, is the leading actor in remembrance work. As a reflection of the complicated political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina, these actors are not situated at the state level as the state is weak given its highly decentralised structure. As noted above, the politics of memory follows these ethnically based dividing lines that underpin diverging and even opposing narratives about the war. Some political agents use commemoration of the siege as a realm for ethno-nationalist power advancement, speaking to the increasingly homogenous Bosniak population of Sarajevo. The fact that the Fond Memorijala, with its focus on military heroism and ethno-nationalist symbolism, is gaining control over an increasing number of memorial sites is a clear reflection of this mode of operation. Yet, it is a mistake to see the ethno-nationalist agenda as having complete dominance because there has been a gradual acknowledgement of victims from different ethnic groups, as has been happening in the case of the Kazani victims.

Furthermore, the political and institutional agents act under the auspices of the international community, which is still very much involved in day-to-day politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Office of the High Representative (OHR), which has extensive powers to make laws and oversee the civilian aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreement, increasingly takes an interest in memory politics. At a national level the OHR has recently used its powers to ban genocide denial and any official celebration of war criminals. In the context of the commemoration of the victims of the siege, it is telling that at the installation of the memorial to the Kazani victims, the current High Representative participated in a gesture of active support (Dzaferagic, 2021). Further, a number of international actors have funded various commemoration initiatives. Here interests diverge. For example, Turkey has given support to the construction of the Kovači memorial site, whereas donors to the War Childhood Museum include Sweden, Germany and France, as well as the EU delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Council.¹⁶

Curators, artists and activists: civic values and pluralism

It is notable that most of the memorials and museums discussed have not come into being through any top-down initiative by an official agency. The two most emblematic street memorials and monuments – the Sarajevo Roses and the Children’s Memorial – were both instigated through pressure and activism from below.

The origins of the Sarajevo Roses are blurry. It is believed that they came into being through the ideas and work of individuals, and that later on victim associations and memory activists began actively engaging with them. The citizens’ association Akcija Gradana has been active in colouring in shell craters, as has the Youth Initiative for Human Rights of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Musi, 2021). There has also been an important change, as the Fond Memorijala in 2012 was entrusted with the task of maintaining the Roses. Subsequently, concerns have been raised that the grassroots counter-monument positionality of the Roses have been appropriated by institutional agents, and that they may potentially be used to endorse the more ethno-nationalist version of victimhood that is displayed at other authentic sites. Nevertheless, segments of civil society are continuing to use the Roses as important sites for a more open-ended and inclusive memorialisation of the siege, and so far have more or less managed to safeguard them as integral street monuments. For example, activists and others successfully protested when Fond Memorijala revealed plans to cover the Roses with glass in order to protect them from destruction (see Musi, 2021: 60). Thus, the sites of the Roses remain open for pluralist mnemonic work as well as continuing to be an integrated part of urban day-to-day life, exposed to all the usual wear and tear.

When it comes to the Children’s Memorial, the parents’ association was a key agent in bringing it into being. In the case of the monument at the Kazani ravine, likewise, it was an association for Kazani victims that drove the process forward. This is a reflection of the relatively strong agency and position of victims’ associations in Bosnian society; as a matter of fact, the memorialisation of civilian victims of the conflict is one of the few civil society arenas where associations from both entities, the Federation and Republika Srpska, cooperate to a certain degree.

Figure 3.3The Children’s Memorial in central Sarajevo (photograph by Johanna Mannergren, June 2018)

Sometimes the line can be hard to draw between activism and art, as many artists who have engaged with the memory of the siege do this from an activist positionality, supporting a counter-narrative that opposes the ethno-nationalist framing of the siege and of the conflict at large. Their work has left limited tangible traces in the urbanscape, with the Canned Beef Monument, mentioned above, as one of few exceptions. Their most important work has been in the form of installations that have instead left valuable intangible imprints by opening up intense discussions about the role of memory and its various power dimensions, including gender hierarchies. One such installation took place at the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the siege. This is analysed, as a significant event, towards the end of this chapter.

When it comes to curators, their positionality is likewise blurred. As discussed above, two of the main museums that have displays concerning life under siege have been unable to secure long-term funding from the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and see their work as running in opposition to the overall, officially sanctioned memory politics. All three museums have international funders and have also put a lot of effort into building transnational networks that link them up with other museums and institutions. The War Childhood Museum has an explicit agenda to cooperate and expand beyond Sarajevo; its collection is partly an international one, bringing together objects and artefacts from its temporary exhibits with children’s artefacts from other conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2020 the museum has had an office in Kyiv in Ukraine and in 2021 it opened an exhibition at the Kyiv History Museum, which focused on the experience of children in Eastern Ukraine since the war started there in 2014. The museum has also curated a travelling exhibition. The Tunnel of Hope Museum sits more seamlessly within the overall frame of militarism, as it is of course linked to the military defence of the city. Nonetheless, representatives of the museum who had been involved since its opening expressed concern that under its new leadership, that is Fond Memorijala, the courage and resistance of civilians against war might subsequently be obscured or downplayed.¹⁷

The agency of ordinary people

The agency of ordinary people has been instrumental in bringing together the key exhibitions on the siege. The Historical Museum’s exhibition with its focus on everyday objects has come about through citizen engagement. As objects continue to be brought in, ordinary people are able to take an active part in adding to the narrative and filling in gaps in the knowledge of the siege. A number of people regularly act as storytellers in the museum, recounting their everyday struggles to survive during the siege. When Sarajevans who experienced the siege visit the exhibition they usually find themselves taking an active part, for example by spontaneously contributing more first-hand testimony about a particular event that they see in a photograph, or by providing a description on how the hospital organised surgery, or by explaining the war-time cooking recipes.¹⁸ Similarly, the War Childhood Museum is continuously collecting oral testimonies and receiving items from ordinary people who remember their war childhood. The Tunnel of Hope Museum meanwhile employs as guides people who have a personal relationship to the tunnel. Some of them are former soldiers; others are civilians. The bloodied bandages on display actually belonged to one of the guides, who was wounded and carried out on the same stretcher that is on display in the museum.¹⁹

Tourism entrepreneurs: cosmopolitanism as a brand that sells

Sarajevo is increasingly a magnet for tourists, many of whom take an active interest in the city’s multi-layered past. As part of a global dark tourism trend, the siege has become an object of tourism. Musi (2021: 59) notes that tourists are offered ‘a variety of reminders of the war for consumption: from “survival guides” to maps of the siege, war paraphernalia and leaflets offering guided tours’. Tour operators and other actors in the tourism sector, such as for example travel journalists, are important agents in constructing outside perceptions of the identity of the besieged city. Tourists are giving more visibility to certain aspects of the past as they move through the city, stopping at certain sites and thereby demonstrating to inhabitants which are the sites that outsiders consider important and meaningful, and why. By visiting some places and not others they contribute to bringing certain sites into being, while letting others remain invisible. All of the war-themed tours of Sarajevo advertised on, for example, Tripadvisor, include a visit to the Tunnel of Hope Museum and the Children’s Memorial, as well as a stop-off on Mount Trebević, so that the tourists get the same bird’s-eye view of the city as did those carrying out the sniping and shelling during the conflict. The tours also tend to stop at the Suada and Olga Bridge in order to share the story about the four young Sarajevans Suada, Olga, Admira and Boško who lost their lives there (see Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2016a). In addition, they often include a visit to the abandoned Winter Olympic sites from 1984, as well as to some memorial sites that relate to the Yugoslav Partisan defence of the city against Nazi occupation in the Second World War. As will be discussed, these ties to the pre-war period are beginning to emerge as part of a nostalgic connection to the Yugoslav socialist past in which ethnic divisions were downplayed instead of emphasised. Tourism entrepreneurs actively engage with this ‘yugostalgia’, linking it to notions of a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic city.

Figure 3.4Bullet cases from the war turned into souvenirs. Shop in the historical centre of town (Baščaršija) (photograph by Johanna Mannergren, February 2018)

Interestingly, there is an absence of international tourists at the Kovači cemetery memorial. While politicians and other official figures use the site as a backdrop for various events, other engagements with the site are limited. On repeated visits to the site, the lack of visitors in general has been noticeable and the site is definitely not on the tourist route. So, while a lot of resources have been invested in this memorial site by a central agent, it seems that the resistance or lack of interest on the part of tourism entrepreneurs as well as the general public places it on the margins of the city’s memoryscape. Elsewhere, meanwhile, tourist engagement provides an alternative space in which marginalised voices can be heard. Hence, tourism entrepreneurs shape the memoryscape in ways that are economically viable for them, whereas tourists themselves make meaning through their presence or absence (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2022).

Narratives: military heroism, cosmopolitanism and lived realities

In the above analysis, we can see that the meaning of the material sites shifts over time as various agents make their imprint, in line with Kappler’s remark that ‘(t)he meanings of a monument can never be fully controlled from higher levels of hierarchy, but instead are subject to constant challenge, modification and resistance’ (Kappler, 2017: 4). With this in mind, we turn our attention to the narrative aspect of the mnemonic formation of the siege. The narratives about the siege are told in relation to the larger narrative contentions about the war. Those larger narratives follow divisive and separate paths in ways that are constitutive of individual and collective identities at the same time as striving to impose a compelling structure onto a fragmented memoryscape (see Bruner, 2002: 89). Three main narrative strands emerge: an ethno-nationalist hegemonic narrative with a particular interest in military heroism; a cosmopolitan narrative that centres on urban identity; and a narrative of everyday resilience and civic values as performed by ordinary citizens.

Military heroism and ethno-nationalism

The memory of the siege has become increasingly ethnicised in a narrative construction of victims versus perpetrators, where the key message is that ethnic division and difference is the reason for the war and that, consequently, separate ethnic futures are necessary for peace. Exclusivity of victimhood and refusal to accept responsibility for the reprehensible deeds of one’s own group have created a cemented dichotomy between ‘heroj ili zločinac’ – ‘hero or war criminal’ (Moll, 2015b: 35). The narrative about the siege is thus fairly seamlessly linked to the larger discourse about competitive victimhood that dominates the Bosniak narrative about the war (Demirel, 2023). It feeds into the dynamics of remembering and is loudly expressed in, for example, social media, and also through televised commemorative events and in school textbooks, as already detailed.

It can be hard to isolate the specific narrative about the siege in the midst of such general contention, yet a reading of the material memoryscapes allows one to trace the key points of the ethno-nationalist narrative and the way it is organised with regard to remembering the siege. As part of the overarching narrative division, the Bosnian Serb narrative largely denies that there was a siege at all, and the Bosniak side makes it part of a nation-building narrative about the birth of the independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The expressive linking of military battle, religious traditions, and the Bosniak nation’s victimhood and struggle for survival is the main narrative frame of the memorials that the Fond Memorijala is in charge of. As already noted, the state is more or less absent in matters of cultural heritage, and memorialisation narratives are mostly formed at entity or canton level, meaning that the memory of the siege is surrounded by silence in Republika Srpska, including in East Sarajevo. In addition to the memorial plaques described in this chapter, this is in evidence in, for example, the renaming of streets after military (Bosniak) heroes, integrating the dominant narrative into the everyday of Sarajevo residents (see Azaryahu, 1996). It is telling that the Fond Memorijala, a key mnemonic agent in the city, has, as yet, not funded any exhibition exploring the everyday experiences of living through the siege.

Figure 3.5Tombstones at Kovači cemetery (photograph by Johanna Mannergren, February 2020)

Cosmopolitanism and commemorating the loss of universal values

There is a clear disconnect between the dominant narrative of ethno-nationalism and nation-building and the narrative of the cosmopolitan city. This narrative is above all told to and by a globally oriented audience, including the diaspora, and is arguably losing some of its traction. Cosmopolitanism in the sense used in this narrative refers to a mixed, multi-cultural urban identity. The cosmopolitan identity of Sarajevo is understood as one of the very reasons for the relentless attacks launched against it, in order to create ethnically homogeneous states. Specific parts of the city such as public spaces, the National Library as well as religious buildings were singled out and attacked as symbols of this inter-mixing; it was the city’s urban identity itself that was the target – hence an urbicide (see Coward, 2004). The cosmopolitan narrative is often referred to and endorsed by Sarajevans who lived in the city before the war, as well as by tourism entrepreneurs and the international community. Elite political agents may also on occasion deploy this narrative.

The narrative of cosmopolitanism has in fact played a key role in the engagement of the international community ever since the war. Lene Hansen (2013) has argued that this narrative of the relatable, urban, modern metropole came into being during the war and challenged predominant discourses of the Balkans as ‘a dark place’ seeped in ‘ancient hatreds’. Through this discursive shift, the representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina changed from a place of no hope (meaning there was no point in any outside intervention) to a place of civic values under attack (eventually making intervention possible). The global narrative of cosmopolitanism is a good fit with the War Childhood Museum, as it speaks to these globally supported civic values. The key narrative of the museum appeals to universal ideas of human rights, peace and the innocence of children, arguing that the attack on the urbanscape is in fact an attack on humanity. The global branding of the city as cosmopolitan is equally important for tourism entrepreneurs who seek to uphold a romanticised imagery of the cosmopolitan city that fits with global discourses about universal humanity and the triumph of human goodness over evil. The prominence of sites such as the Suada and Olga Bridge on tourist routes through the city testifies to this.

In addition to multi-culturalism and diversity, the cosmopolitan narrative also alludes to a distinctive urban, self-ascribed, sophisticated identity that is often juxtaposed and contrasted with a supposed rural and ‘uncultured’ identity. According to this version, the forces attacking Sarajevo were drawn from the population of rural areas, who were an easy target for ethno-nationalist propaganda as they already were distrustful of the cosmopolitan city. In post-war times, this discourse translates into a contempt for newcomers from rural communities who arrive seeking a financially more viable life in the city. Bădescu (2020) calls this an exclusionary type of cosmopolitanism that takes little interest in ethnic identities yet draws up other boundaries and hierarchies.

The narrative of the unique identity of Sarajevo survives among many of its pre-war citizens despite their war experiences. It has also been adopted by activists and a younger generation who are critical of what they perceive to be an inward-looking political and administrative leadership, and who yearn for the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina to step up to play a role in international arenas, including in the European Union. While there are indeed mixed neighbourhoods, mixed families and de-ethnified social relations among many inhabitants, the insistence on cosmopolitanism may obscure the fact that the demographic changes caused by the war mean that today the overwhelming majority of Sarajevans identify as Bosniaks (Bădescu, 2020).

Everyday resilience and dignity

The director of the War Childhood Museum calls the stories that are circulated in the museum ‘honest’, and says they offer a different perspective from the state narrative; this ‘partly answers the question regarding why we are not supported by the state, because we do not fit their narrative’.²⁰ Likewise, the director of the History Museum agrees that an ethno-nationalist narrative of the war is gaining ever more traction and that the aim of the museum’s exhibition on the siege is to counter that with everyday stories:

Figure 3.6Handmade sign that was posted at a particularly dangerous crossing, warning of snipers (preserved and displayed at the Historical Museum, photograph by Johanna Mannergren, February 2020)

To counteract ethno-nationalist narratives of the war the museums try to knit together a multitude of personal stories, inviting people to talk about their everyday experiences, as outlined above. The focus is on the civilian experience and the resilience and resistance of human beings who uphold civility in the face of death and suffering at the hands of others. The alternative spaces created at the museums provide openings for the telling of diverse experiences; for example, the gendered experiences of war can be narrated as well as the experience of being a child – perspectives that tend to go unheard. The museums thus avoid sticking to a closed and static narrative but rather let visitors create their own interactions and interpretations. This openness is promoted through the focus on objects as the carriers of meaning and emotions. By selecting the objects of the everyday as a valid point of reference, the museums resist the erasure of the terrible individual and social losses that war and violence entail. These stories are told through things that evoke emotions and affect. Indeed, the director of the War Childhood Museum insists that it is not really a museum of things – it is a museum of stories as told by the things.

Events: rituals and ruptures

As the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo is the site for a curated cycle of commemorative events which through their very recurrence support and maintain a hegemonic memory. They are performative practices that are inscribed in the official calendar and as such they provide a sense of continuity and regularly remind citizens of the dominant narratives of the war. The event as a performative act ‘rehearses and recharges the emotion which gave the initial memory or story embedded in it its sticking power’ (Winter, 2010: 12). Events are thus a means to (re)activate the taken for granted and (relatively) stable material landscape of monuments and markers. The mnemonic event is not always a ritual, however. It may be a sudden rupture and shock that does not recur but nevertheless leaves a lasting impact. The urban memoryscape includes a dynamic stream of demonstrations, protests and artistic interventions that rely on urban public spaces to resonate and make an impact.

Recurring rituals instigated from above

An official ‘Day of Remembrance of all the citizens of Sarajevo killed during the siege’ is observed on 5 February. Every year representatives and officials at various political levels – the city, the canton, the federation and the state – pay homage on that day to the victims by laying wreaths at the ‘authentic site’ of the Markale market shellings. It should be noted that the commemoration of the (mostly) Bosnian Serb victims that were buried at the Kazani ravine now has its own official day of remembrance, on 9 November (Dzaferagic, 2021). There seems to be a missed opportunity here – the opportunity to commemorate all victims of the siege together on one date.

Another key recurring event in the city is the celebration of 6 April as the Day of the City of Sarajevo. In Yugoslav times, this was the date to mark the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the city from the Nazi occupation. In relation to the latest war, the day commemorates the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, turning the event into an occasion that makes a temporal move by connecting the latest war and the siege with Yugoslav history. On this day each year, politicians and officials stop by at a number of key monuments where flowers are laid down and speeches delivered. Usually, the first stop is at the well-known Eternal Flame memorial in the centre of the city, which honours the Yugoslav Partisans who fought the Nazis. The tour continues to a number of other memorial sites concerned with the Second World War, such as the Vraca Memorial Park just outside the city, which commemorates the anti-fascist struggle, as well as the Jewish cemetery. With regard to the latest war, the tour visits the Kovači graveyard, the Children’s Memorial, and the Suada and Olga Bridge (Musi, 2014). The memorial sites connected with the Second World War are usually half-forgotten places and it is interesting how they are reactivated as significant places each year through these recurring visits. The linking of the two wars through a public ritual deepens the meanings of the sites, as the history of heroic resistance against the Nazis is used to support a present-day nation-building narrative of heroism.

Activist interventions for plurality and inclusivity

The inclusion of the Kazani victims in the mnemonic formation of the siege has been a recurring theme in this chapter. We can pinpoint a couple of key mnemonic events that ruptured the memoryscape and precluded the material manifestation in the form of a monument to those murdered and then buried at the ravine. One such event took place in 2015, when the activist initiative Jer me se tiče, ‘Because it concerns me’, installed a memorial plaque in a Sarajevo park in memory of the Kazani victims. The organisation works for a pluralistic memoryscape where all victims are commemorated and describes its activities as ‘memory guerrilla tactics’. The plaque was destroyed very soon after, however – it is not known by whom (Ristic, 2018: 192). Thus, the event did not leave a lasting inscription in the physical space, yet it had made the fight for recognition at least fleetingly visible in the public space.

Another sudden event occurred when the then president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bakir Izetbegović, in June 2016 paid a visit to the Kazani site and said, ‘I should have come here earlier’. The event became big news and was interpreted as an opening towards reconciliation (Orentlicher, 2018: 307; TV1 BiH, 2016). With hindsight it seems that these two interventions – one grassroots and the other top-down – had an impact on the politics of memory that eventually led to the actual instalment of the monument, as described earlier in the chapter.

Artistic commemoration of urbicide

There have been a number of artistic interventions seeking to express tangibly the intangible losses of sociality and diversity that urbicidal violence brings. One such installation stands out: the Sarajevo Red Line was an installation mounted in 2012 to mark twenty years since the siege started. Bosnian artist and theatre director Haris Pašović placed 11,541 red plastic chairs into rows stretching for 800 metres along the main street that runs through the city centre. There was one chair for each person killed and 643 of them were child sized. This huge artwork was shocking, as each empty chair represented a rupture in intersubjective webs of relations: family, relatives, friends, co-workers, neighbours, acquaintances. The empty chairs all faced a stage where dance and singing performances and poetry readings unfolded over the course of the day and evening. The dead were ‘the audience and the living were transformed into bystanders on the sidelines’.²² While there has been a debate around the artwork, specifically concerning the number of the dead that it alludes to and similarly to the debate around the Children’s Memorial, the installation has been widely embraced and has become part of the recent historical memory of the city, both locally and globally. It was an event that conveyed the collective and individual loss resulting from an urbicide, a loss that for a moment was made visible and tangible. The installation did not come with a message to remember in order to heal, or to understand better, or to enrol the dead in a patriotic project. It was an acknowledgement of the enormity of the individual and collective loss caused by the siege.

The SANE analysis: memory and the quality of peace

The memory of the siege of Sarajevo is a wound that runs deep and is a challenge for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. How is the siege to be remembered? Was the siege a logical outcome of deep-seated ethnic hatred? Was it a reaction stemming from rural discontent with a cosmopolitan, urban elite? Should it be remembered as a military battle focusing on soldiers who gave their lives for freedom? What about the courage of civilians defending a multi-cultural way of life against the ethnic divisionism of political elites, and what about international passivity in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe? What about the loss of life, the loss of love, the loss of childhood? Who was a victim, who was a perpetrator? These questions and their responses are entangled in the memory of the siege. How they are voiced – and silenced – through commemoration impacts on the quality of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The mnemonic formation of the siege is in many ways a reflection of the overall divisive memory politics of that country which has created parallel ‘ethnic peace(s)’. Yet the SANE analysis of the mnemonic formation points to a number of openings towards a more just peace.

The sites that we have studied here leave their material mark in the form of monuments and memorials that pin down the mnemonic formation of the siege with at least a semblance of permanence. Importantly, the sites may seem to tell only one story, but this chapter asks, with Božić (2017: 17): ‘What do war monuments apparently reveal to us? and … What do war monuments attempt to conceal from us?’ Every new addition to the memorial landscape breaks some silences, whereas others are maintained or imposed. There are on-going fluctuations between silence and speech, recognition and erasure, as is illustrated by the case of how the Kazani killings are remembered.

It is also clear that sites come to life and generate meaning when someone engages with them. What happens to a site that is not visited? And does it matter who visits? The residents of Sarajevo shape the post-war city by their movements, activating some sites as meaningful by their presence and engagement, and deactivating others through withdrawal. Likewise, the visits by tourism entrepreneurs and tourists to certain sites and not others have an effect on their meaning and significance.

The on-going agential work in the city destabilises the seeming permanence of monuments, memorials and other material marks. At the time of writing, the ethno-nationalistic attempt to reinforce its appropriation of memories is on-going. The Suada and Olga Bridge is a point of reference in the shifting of meanings. However, victim associations, artists, activists, curators and tourism entrepreneurs provide plural perspectives which in the urban public spaces confront and challenge hegemonic storytelling, thereby making homogenisation impossible. These agents uphold memories of multiple entanglements and palimpsests of experiences (see Fridman, 2022).

Alternative commemoration activities engage with, instead of closing off, the experiences of ordinary people. The focus on people’s everyday experiences of the siege allows for a more pluralist and inclusive mnemonic practice which challenges divisionism. The engagement of ordinary people with memory work in the museums points to a need that top-down commemoration cannot satisfy. In hegemonic accounts of the past that seek to erase ambivalence there is, after all, little space for the ambiguities and fine-tuned mechanisms of grief, dignity and co-existence. This chapter has noted the remarkable affective power of objects. The artefacts and objects representing a difficult heritage are evocative of plural emotions, ideas and narratives. Through the tangible objects, intangible losses to do with the fabric of everyday life are acknowledged. The acknowledgement of the everyday of war as a cultural heritage through the objects on display in the museums can contribute to dignifying civilians who experienced urbicide. The exhibitions in Sarajevo thus serve as valuable examples of how such difficult cultural heritage after conflict can be used to direct attention and motivate action towards a more inclusive narrative – one that recognises victims’ experiences. They foster a dialogue about the past and open up new avenues towards understanding the experiences of others, thereby rendering the boundaries between communities more permeable.

This chapter has further investigated how open-ended sites and open-ended events can encompass pluralistic meanings. Aesthetic interventions can produce representations that intervene in the broader memoryscape. For example, the Sarajevo Red Line art installation spoke a language that communicated the ever-present loss, offering survivors an opportunity to be silent and letting art speak beyond polarising narratives. Art may thus reconfigure the political imaginaries of the past (the way we remember) and also the future (the way we envision where we go from here).

Finally, the mnemonic formation of the siege is particularly interesting as it renders visible the violence of urbicide and the concomitant memory politics that are formed in and by the urbanscape. The urban is a practice in heterogeneous pluralism and is therefore always in the making. Part of the impossibility of imposing a single narrative derives from the fact that urbanity is defined by heterogeneity as an existential quality of life (Coward, 2008), and thus the living space of the city is defined by its inhabitants. While Sarajevo today is structured along more or less ethnicised spaces and mnemonic practices, these patterns are in fact not inscribed through fixed borders or checkpoints. The materiality of the city is both a reflection of the society that has constructed it as well as a space that is continuously produced through the actions of its citizens (Lefebvre, 1996). The city is thus a living memoryscape and its memory politics is not confined to official remembrance spaces and orchestrated events. The social fabric of everyday life unfolds in relation to the material registers of memory, and it is through the spatial practices in the sites of the city that meanings are made and remade.

Conclusions

The urbicide carried out in Sarajevo attempted to erase a history of pluralism and co-existence and destroy public spaces of urbanity. The city’s current demographics indicate that this attempted urbicide succeeded at least partially, since most inhabitants of post-war Sarajevo now share the same ethnic identity. But the prevailing ethno-nationalism does face a number of challenges. The above examples of commemorative practices and sites speak to possibilities of embracing memory in ways that can improve the quality of peace in Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and beyond.

While analyses of Bosnian memory politics tend to focus on the silo structure of memorialisation, we can see that a plurality of mnemonic agents provide different narratives, activate a number of sites and participate in events that hold potential transformation. We have noted that there are changes over time as to how various victim groups are met with recognition, and that at times the contours of a more inclusive peace can be discerned. At the same time, this analysis has pointed to a number of moves by elite memory agents to increase control over memorial sites and events, which indicates that the divisive narrative of ethno-nationalism is in some respects gaining ground. The mnemonic formation of the siege of Sarajevo is thus restless; it solidifies, fractures and again solidifies. A shifting memoryscape emerges, in which the memory of the war is under constant formation.