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Presented by Washburn University Center for Diversity Studies and The Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas.
Let me start by saying how happy I am to be with you here today, helping celebrate the anniversary of one of the crucial judicial decisions not just in American education but in American history as well, the formal desegregation of public schools in 1954. I'm glad to be able to be with you, my friends, in Kansas, at Washburn University for numerous reasons. But the main reason I am here, nevertheless, is because I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina, where one of the bloody Balkan wars was fought with me unfortunately in its midst, spending three and a half years under siege with my family, my mother my wife and my two sons, in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, between 1992 and 1995. I could have been killed or maimed there any day by shell, shrapnel, or sniper bullet, or by knife, for that matter, walking to work or fetching water, or scavenging for food which were all scarce indeed.. I am here to talk about a land where, more relevantly, minorities are still unemancipated. So I might be able to give some kind of European, or Balkan, or Bosnian perspective on how education functions in the situation of diversity, but a diversity which had recently degenerated or metastasized into a bloody war. The point I will be trying to make is that segregation became the main political aim of several nationalist parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina in early 1992, so late in the day, soon after the downfall of Communist rule, not just the kind we might call "segregation with coexistence" which you had here till the nineteen fifties, but a kind of segregation program based on the principle that one nation just cannot live in the same town or even in the same state together with members of other specified nations. This, of course, did not just have to do with education, but with all aspects of life, and it led to killings, rapings, expulsions, and the infamous "ethnic cleansing". Before I go on, before I try to give you a sketch of how we in Sarajevo managed national diversity in the midst of the war- and I take manage to mean, among other things survive - I have to give you a basic account of what happened there, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1992 and 1996, especially in its capital, Sarajevo, where I live and lived then.
Almost literally, we, some 400,000 people of several nationalities, Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jewish, and others, woke up one day in Sarajevo at the beginning of April 1992 to find that a group of our neighbors, quite a large group, all of them Serbs, dissatisfied with a referendum, took to the surrounding hills and started shelling us from some 1500 artillery pieces, having the Yugoslav People's Army, which we considered the army of all nationalities in former Yugoslavia, completely on their side. Bosnia and Herzegovina used to be one of the republics of former Yugoslavia which existed - with a hiatus during the Second World War - from 1918 to 1991, but Bosnia can boast of a much longer history - a thousand years - as a more or less separate political entity. What they, our neighbors, radical nationalist Serbs, wanted was to persuade us, the rest of the population, in this way that all of us were one nation, that is Serbs, rather than what people felt themselves to be: Bosniaks, that is Muslims, or Croats, or Jews, or Gypsies, or Checks, or whatever.
Together with the shelling of Sarajevo and other large towns, like Mostar, this group of nationalist Serbs, with the help of the Yugoslav People's Army, at the time the fourth strongest military force in Europe, heavily dominated by Serb nationals, started with making several regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina one-national by expulsion, intimidation through rape, indiscriminate shelling and random killings of civilians, isolating members of other nationalities in detention, or concentration camps under completely inhuman conditions, and finally using massive extermination in case that other methods did not work. It was like segregation raised on a higher level, more separate and less equal, a complete intolerance as a basis of national policy. At the highest point of their dominance they, the so-called Republic Serbian, held about three fourths of total Bosnian and Herzegovinian territory.
Quite soon, unfortunately, the other two national administrative and military establishments, Croat and Muslim, followed suit, under pressure, one has to admit, as a reaction to harsh and unexpected attacks and techniques used by the Serbs, and they produced methods and institutions of their own, quite similar to the Serb ones. Techniques of ethnic cleansing developed as the war continued. Not all of them were physical extermination or forced removal. Since it was happening, as Joseph Conrad would have put it, under Western eyes, the eyes of the media, the UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) which were based in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the numerous NGOs, international humanitarian organizations trying to help, techniques for making people leave a certain area or a certain town became more subtle and insidious, not always immediately obvious and recognizable. A lot of pressure became psychological, or physical only in part, and lack of work, lack of food or water became a factor that made people leave. But physical extermination still played a prominent role, especially in the Serb-dominated regions. The most radical case happened in a small town in Eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica, where Serb armed forces in the summer of 1995 killed more than 7,500 male Muslims, and forced women and children to leave, of course allowing no press coverage of the operation.
So eventually, as the consequence of these wartime happenings, all three major Bosnian and Herzegovinian nations actually became minorities in some part of the territory, as a product of decisions made by politicians and military leaders. It was the civilians, who had absolutely no say in these decisions that ended up as minorities. I am a minority in Sarajevo, the city where I lived my whole life, and my family have lived for five generations. What does it actually mean? Whereas before this conflict all three major nations were considered "constitutional", that is, formative and indispensable in any political process or decision on the whole territory of B&H, from the level of local communities and municipalities regardless of their percentile presence, all of them actually became minorities in some parts of the newly reconstituted single-national official and semi-official territories. They became second-class citizens even formally in some of them. Of course, these developments had serious consequences in education as well. But I have to talk about the broader social context first. In terms of numbers: some 200.000 people died in the 1992-95 war which had such results, including some 20.000 children, there were tens of thousands of rape cases, about a 1.5 million people were displaced, out of which almost a 800.000 are refugees still, abroad or in the country itself, but not in the place they used to live. This is the situation 6 years after the conflict technically ended by the Dayton Peace Agreement.
What influence did these momentous events exert on life of an ordinary citizen, like myself? The siege of my town, of Sarajevo, lasted some 1200 days, longer than that of Stalingrad in the Second World War, and for most of the people in it, life slid to unbelievable pre-medieval patterns and levels. For some 900 days there was no water in Sarajevo's water supply system, since the attackers, which some help of the defenders, stopped the flow. And so we Sarajevans learned how much water does one really need per day, even when scrimping and saving. My five-member family needed about 30 liters of potable water a day, and each drop would be recycled for toilet flushing. For what we used to call "technical water", water for washing and flushing, we also tried catching rain-water under the gutters and drainpipes broken by shrapnel. This water was muddy and dark brown with all the loose dirt flying in the air from the burnt and destroyed buildings, but adequate for its purpose. Potable water, however, we had to carry, in plastic jerry-cans, in my case for some three quarters of a mile which was the distance to the closest water-supply point, going there two or three times a days. Our arms grew longer, the physical exercise didn't do us any harm, unlike the increased probability to be shot at and killed by snipers, or by a shell fragments. A friend of mine got killed while fetching water, several were wounded. The act of fetching water remained for me the greatest physical humiliation and stress during the war, summer and winter, although I remember it now more like a very impressive movie I saw than like something that happened to me personally.
The lack of food was another appalling fact of our existence. When the war started we had some supplies stashed away in larders and refrigerators. But they dwindled and disappeared sooner than we expected, especially when electricity vanished, our freezers thawed, and we had to make a last feast using all our frozen supplies. The next three months the only food obtainable in stores that remained open was bread, and it was rationed to four and a half ounces a day per person. There were two ways to obtain food, before the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) started distributing food as a form of humanitarian aid: to stand in enormously long lines in front of humanitarian organizations, most of them associated to Islamic and Christian religious organizations, where you would beg for a kilo of rice or two kilos of flour, and your religious allegiance questioned. The black market, on the other hand, had everything, of course. You could always buy there cooking oil for 15 to 20 $ a liter, you could have potatoes and onions for the price of 5 $ for 2 pounds. You could have coffee and strong alcoholic drinks, as well, for enormous prices. We used to speculate that the war actually broke out, and the siege, lasted so long because top politicians from all sides were involved in black market food sales. Like many other people in first two war years I lost some weight: more than 50 lb. But then I had been overweight in the first place.
Even if you had raw food, you had to cook it. Electricity, natural gas and heating oil disappeared at the beginning of the war. People developed all sort of ingenious small wood-burning stoves, some made from modified pressure-cookers. We used to make bread in a pressure cooker, being very energy-efficient. Most of the trees in city parks were cut down and used for fuel, often sold by soldiers to civilians for beefed-up prices. We soon learned the fuel value of shoes, wall-to-wall carpeting, and, unfortunately, books. We used to know precisely how many pages did you need to boil water for coffee, or for spaghetti. I myself participated in looting of an old Turkish military hospital, where I, together with my neighbors, dug out parquetry to be used as fire wood. But you have to realize that we were on our own, there was no organized help on the part of local or any other government organization in supplies of fuel or water.
One thing I would like you also to realize, although I know it is hard, is that these people who fetched water, who cooked on home-made devices, often with chimney pipes going through unglazed, plastic-covered windows, and stole wood wherever they could, were actually middle-class people like you, people who used to own poodles and pianos before the war, who used to attend classical music concerts and the opera, go on cruises in the Mediterranean, and sent their daughter to ballet classes, and to learn English in Great Britain and America. When the war started we all become of necessity hunters and gatherers, not just serfs.
For three and a half years we lived in a time-worn archetype; a war ambiance that only in the beginning seemed unique to us in negative terms. Prejudices breeding national hatred were spread, the fear of the other, whoever the other might be, primarily through the media. But we in Sarajevo were special in a sense, because we as a larger city had more that one enemy. This is the difference from similar situations of such oppression in previous history I would like to point out.
The most prominent and the most obvious enemy were Serb radical nationalists, who not only besieged us, shelled us and killed us from the surrounding hills, sniped at us, stopped our water, electricity, gas and food supply, but also wanted to convert us, like I said before, whosoever remained in Sarajevo, Muslims, Croats, Jews, Gypsies, Germans, Hungarians, into Serbs. Their media kept repeating that we are all Serbs but that we stubbornly didn't not want to admit it for some reason. We were in peril of life and limb indeed, but our identities were also challenged and in danger. For instance, who was I? Would I be able to retain my old identity: a Bosnian Croat, part Check, part Slovenian, living in Sarajevo, the fourth generation Sarajevan? Or was I to change into something else? What?
The second enemy was no less deadly: it was the almost automatic response on the part of some of the more hysterical or maybe just radical members of the Bosniak government, and the Muslim controlled media, who tried to present all things non-Muslim, anything Serb and later on most things Croatian, as coming straight from some unorthodox Christian hell. All nationalistic forces in other parts of Bosnia/Herzegovina used the same method to spread hate and suspicion. But I am primarily talking about what I know, what I have seen, what I have lived through.
On the third side, radical Croatian nationalists from the southern part, from Herzegovina, kept repeating that no Croatians have been left in Sarajevo. All the ones worth their salt have moved from the Muslim state which included Sarajevo to what they called Herzeg-Bosnia, a desolate region to the south, but under complete Croatian nationalistic control. So again, according to them, I did not exist. And they were supposed to be my own people.
So the obvious question arose: what should one do in such a situation? If one decided to stay in Sarajevo, and I had to stay for various reasons, most of which were pragmatic rather than patriotic, one should obviously try to fight against all these prejudices, affirm whatever one believed to be true, at least to show one's presence there. But what was true? Three powerful propaganda machines spread whatever they wanted through their media. In Sarajevo it was clear that one should have obviously spoken and written against national prejudices and clichés which were widely spread, against the black market run by corrupt politicians, against the impossible conditions under which civilians lived, but it was, believe me, rather hard to be intellectually detached while Serbian shells kept hitting the house in which you lived which had no military significance whatsoever. I mean this quite literally.
Still, there were quite a few people in Sarajevo who did fight against the tide, who defied public opinion and tried affirming values unfashionable in war: like tolerance rather than hatred, beauty without national attributes, knowledge and truth, instead of ugliness, ignorance, and lies which seemed to be the ruling principles on all sides. These people believed and told everyone who would listen that Bosnians and Herzegovinians had to live together, that it might perhaps be advantageous for Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs to coexist, rather than try to exterminate each others, or establish each their own mini-states. I was among them.
Why did we do it? Ours was obviously a very weak voice crying in the wilderness, compared to official propaganda, and, since the peril was constant and considerable, very many people thought that the best attitude was to crawl to your literal or metaphorical shelter, or sanctuary, and stay there, keep a low profile. After all, what could you hope to accomplish? But in us there was, I believe, a kind of defiance which would not let us be prudent and commonsensical in a completely post-modern situation. It is a difficult concept to verbalize which we clung to and obviously not quite rational, but let me put it this way: national barbarians in power on all sides were actually intellectual outsiders, we thought. They had started a virtual anachronism: a war of the village against the city, or the rural against the urban spirit. It was only villages in the last hundred years in Bosnia that remained one-national. Town people lived together regardless of their nationalities, some people of different nationalities were friends, there. was even a high percentage of national intermarriages among Bosnian and Herzegovinian nations, some 12%, especially after the Second World War. Why should those of us who did not feel the nationalist fervor, although lacking in the power of tooth and claw, creep silently to our holes, turning tails to expiate the sins of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who moved to cities?
So, in spite of almost constant shelling, where sometimes more than 3000 artillery and mortar shells would hit Sarajevo in a single day and the average was about a thousand, in spite of an almost total military blockade cutting all communication with the rest of the world, in spite of having no water in our homes for months on end, no electricity, very little low-quality food, in spite of constant proximity of death, urban people of Sarajevo fought to preserve normalcy, or the appearance of normalcy. I already mentioned the fact that there was no running water: nevertheless, people in the streets looked surprisingly clean and comparatively well-dressed. There was very little food and still, thousands of wartime recipes sprang up. Since we had more time, social life flourished.
But I want to tell you the war story of what I knew best, of my school, Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. Before the war we used to have a spacious five-level building with some 40 classrooms and 80 offices, a large library, language laboratories, auditoriums, a cafeteria etc. Unfortunately, the building happened to be about 150 ft. from the front line, the little Sarajevo Miljacka river which divided a Serb-occupied part from the rest of the city. So, because of extremely difficult access, we had to move away, to the huge Austrian building of Palais de Justice, Palace of Justice, downtown, where the Law Faculty and the Rector's Office were normally located. There we had a single large office, and much later, a single classroom.
Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo consists of 12 departments and its faculty used to number 240, of all Bosnian nations, and they used to teach some 3.000 students, of all nations again, before the war. In our new, somewhat limited premises, we, the faculty, fixed the huge broken glass plates on the window frames, covering them with plastic foil instead of glass, the way most windows in Sarajevo were "glazed" at the time. We organized things in the following way: each day Monday through Saturday was assigned to two departments to have tutorials and/or exams in the single large room. We had absolutely no heating so that when temperature outside fell to -17 C (0 Fahrenheit) which is common in Sarajevo winters, the inside temperature was around 32 F or 0 Centigrade. And yet, we followed the regimen by which there were regular meeting of all heads of departments each Wednesday, and the full Faculty Council would meet every first Wednesday in the month. Even under these circumstances faculty members found strength to discuss minor issues for hours on end. And we had regular meetings with students.
The event which stays fixed in my mind illustrating this atmosphere is an oral defense of a required senior paper which happened in the winter 92/93, our worst wartime winter. It took place in a side room which we borrowed from the Rector's office, without glass or plastic or anything on its windows and consequently inside temperature was below the freezing point. And yet the student candidate insisted on maintaining the complete customary academic procedure. The paper was on political aspects of E.L. Doctorow's novels: the presentation and discussion lasted for more than an hour, and the student and the two committee members sat there seemingly calmly, discussing literary and political issues, in reality almost completely frozen.
Of course, there were considerable pressure from all sides to segregate university institutions. The extreme nationalist idea, realized partly only in the Republic Serbian and the city of Mostar, in Herzegovina, was to create nationalist universities: separate schools for each nation. Nationalists, of course, like everywhere else in the world, wanted the "separate but equal" principle to be established, which would of course prove to be not only unequal but would also ghettoize minorities. On the other hand, quite paradoxically, some minorities, like the Croatian one in Sarajevo, wanted separate institutions for completely irrational reasons. But we in the Faculty of Philosophy resisted such concept. Our faculty was one of the rare ones to have a Croatian dean, me, elected by my peers at the beginning of the war, although a large majority of faculty who stayed with me during the war were Muslim, or Bosniak.
The general cultural atmosphere in Sarajevo was strange, to say the least. All over the besieged city you could see theater performances, concerts, candle-light lectures, later on even film festivals and rock concerts devoid of nationalist implications. A very good production of Hair was staged by one of the experimental small theater groups. Susan Sontag directed Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a very appropriate play for a siege situation. Joan Baez gave two concerts. Vanessa Redgrave used to come every couple of months. Private newspapers and magazines sprang up, often full of primitive and ardent political partisanship, but also sometimes surprisingly independent. I was most impressed by a virtual boom of small, private FM radio stations. I lived almost my entire life in the Communist era, and the only radio I have ever known up to then was the huge, closely watched and rudely controlled government radio, in which everything was prerecorded and censored, where everybody had to toe the party line, whatever it happened to be at the time. And then suddenly, at a time that seemed least propitious, there appeared six or seven little FM stations, playing alternative music, two or three among them airing uncensored talk shows, discussing freely all sorts of issues.
Very soon I myself started broadcasting a regular weekly program on one of them. I discovered that the radio is an ideal medium in a war. Teaching and publishing becomes rather impractical in a siege situation, and when a friend of mine, the owner of Radio Wall, Sarajevo, offered me to start any kind of program I wanted on his station I jumped at the opportunity.
Although I had to walk every Wednesday half a mile to the station along one of the main Sarajevo's streets, almost always under sniper fire with shells exploding quite close, I had a unique chance: an hour of live program space during which I could play any music and present any position I considered relevant, absolutely live. For several reasons I chose to play American country music: I have always liked it, there had never been an American country music program on the radio in Sarajevo, and, and this is probably the most important reason, in Bosnia American country music had almost exclusively an urban audience. Paradoxical perhaps, but true. Like I said before, the war in Bosnia was being fought between the parochial village spirit (in musical terms it would be reflected in playing only Serbian, Croatian or Bosniak folk music) and urban cosmopolitanism. In Bosnia American country music had to be perceived as cosmopolitan if for no other reason then for the fact that it wasn't either Serbian, or Croatian, or Bosniak. It sounded strange and it was distant for what seemed relevant issues in Sarajevo. It seemed to me that country music was a field in which I could comment on the possibilities of integrated multinational living incorporated in country music sub-genres such as Tex-Mex, ranchero, Cajun, etc. I could keep throwing at my audience the glaring example of U. S. of A. as a multi-national and multi-religious experiment, with various cultures co-existing next to each other, not in love and amity perhaps, but generally speaking mostly in peace, especially compared to the then warring Bosnian tribes.
I could and did also talk about the American Civil War which ultimately failed to divide, and about democracy which as a political idea was alien to most of my countrymen. Democracy for them meant grab all you can. Country music, being so down to earth, was for me also a model on which I could easily show the absurdity of prejudices, the lies of pseudo-intellectual pretenses, of philosophizing about alleged national interests which were actually only primitive bigotry, such as the idea of all Serbs, all Croats, or all Eskimos, should live in a single state, without any minorities.
During these years I did many other things. But the thing I am most proud of during that time was my radio program, which always pleaded for a multinational undivided Sarajevo and Bosnia, for the punishment of all war criminals regardless of their nationality or religion, for the chance that Sarajevans be given the right to live together. Altogether I did 186 shows.
And now there is no war any longer, or at least there is no regular shooting. Bosnia is slowly recuperating, too slowly, perhaps. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you of a happy ending, at least not yet. It is extremely difficult to prophecy possible outcomes. On the political and military level, in spite of some positive changes, I believe if NATO troops were to pull out now, which I hope is unlikely, war would soon resume, together with a tendency of nationally pure territories. Perhaps with slow, patient education, with the help of developments in other surrounding countries, like Croatia where nationalists lost two elections at the end of 1999 and the beginning of the year 2000, with the help of the International Tribunal for War Crimes in Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, Netherlands, which holds the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic now, together with other war criminals from all three warring national groups, there might be some improvement in trust and confidence between nationalities.
But the education in all parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina is seriously hampered by the fact that it is still segregated in many ways. Not only are minority students looked down upon, hazed, and molested by national majorities, but the curricula are nationalistically geared, especially in history and literature. There are three histories and three literatures being taught in schools in different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, threatening to perpetuate suspicion and hatred against other nations and persons, whoever he or she might be. And this produces a kind of perpetual segregation. Since some 60 percent of the prewar teaching staff of Sarajevo university left the country during the war and in its immediate aftermath, and since the process of negative selection based on inadequate remuneration and political backing of inadequate candidates went on for at least twenty years before the last war, the perspectives for the future of the university are bleak indeed. The full extent of the academic and professional damage, aggravated also by many undeserved advanced academic degrees granted hastily during the war, is for the time being masked by a strong international presence in the form of resident and visiting foreign professors, but this is hardly to be expected to last long. Also the dependable academically reliable teaching staff is getting long in teeth and the university funds do not allow moneys for training of young staff.
The young of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of Croatia as well, again of all nations, are also voting with their backs. In a poll a magazine from Sarajevo established in the year 2000 that 60% of people below 25 wanted to leave the country. And small wander, if you consider the following facts: in the American case, you started with segregated schools at the end of the 19th century, and then in the middle of the 20th century came the Brown decision and desegregation.. With us, we started with desegregated schools in the last quarter of the 19th century, and ended mostly segregated in the 21 century, seemingly by our own will.
The greatest hope for Bosnia, for the whole of the Balkans, therefore, is the potential growth and development of the European Union. If at least some countries of former Yugoslavia would become members of the Union it would considerably lower tensions, since it would matter much less to which of the little states a particular piece of territory belongs. In the end, the hope of all of us is to become Europeans first and only later, and at a more convenient hour as H. D. Thoreau would have put it, Serbs, Croats or Muslims, or Albanians for that matter. Only thus, it seems, could we prevent future Holocausts which on the average have been hitting at least every other generation in the Balkans in some form for the last 500 years. The second important factor for a better future in Bosnia is an uncompromising insistence on preserving a high standard of human rights for all, especially minorities in all Balkan states. If human rights are strictly maintained it matters much less in which state one is living, and whether one belongs to a minority or a majority.
The fight before Bosnians, as before you, Americans, is long. Bosnia is one of these paradigmatic places where the future is tested, and where the question is being asked again in no uncertain form: can people of different nationalities live together, in harmony and peace? But we have to hope that we shall overcome, that we shall give a positive answer to this question, like you did in Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, like you will, I am sure, in the war against terrorism. After all, historically speaking, great powers -that is Great Britain, France, Russia, and the US - created directly or indirectly both of former Yugoslavias. Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state, on the other hand, was created in 1992, against the wishes of most great powers. Let us hope it will prove more durable, less segregated, and with more human rights for all, especially minorities. Let me end by saying to you, my American friends: Happy anniversary of the Brown decision, and carry on. I hope we shall overcome, indeed, all over the world, some day. Thank you for your patience.
See also the news story from the Topeka Capital-Journal about Dr. Radeljkovic's address.