Sezam wrote:
Banjaluka 1991 - 1995 je jako opsezna tema, a posto smo na istoriji podforumu, daj da se sto vise bavimo detaljima i faktima, jer samo cemo tako dobiti pravu sliku o tome kako se je jedan grad za samo cetiri godine uspio do temelja promijeniti.
http://www.amazon.de/Eine-bosnische-Sta ... 3486705482
recenzija Ive Banca
Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina (pop. 195,692 in 1991)
and currently the capital of the Bosnian Serb entity, stands in stark contrast to the
widespread notion that the Bosnian confl ict (1992–1995) was a war of fronts. In fact,
as elsewhere in northwestern Bosnia (Bosanska Krajina), the violent expulsion of
non-Serbs and the destruction of sixteen Muslim mosques was conducted in peacetime
and practically without the use of fi rearms. This extraordinary story of how a
multinational and multiconfessional city (43.47 percent Muslims, 31.21 percent Serbs,
and 17.38 percent Croats in 1991) became a nationally homogeneous capital of the
misnamed Republika Srpska is the subject of Armina Galijaš’s monograph, which she
defended as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna in 2009.
Galijaš has produced an impressively documented book that is the product of
very thorough research of all available literature, periodical and monographic, as
well as interviews with notables from Banja Luka; questionnaires completed by refugees
from the same city; all the relevant reports, notably by UNCHR special rapporteur
Tadeusz Mazowiecki; and materials from the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia. The work is conceived chronologically and thematically
and embraces every imaginable phenomenon—political development, importance of
new social stratifi cation, religious and ideological reductionism, terror of the new
Serb elite, the growth of apartheid society, and the expulsion of non-Serbs. It is very
diffi cult to imagine that we shall ever get a better overview of this important segment
in the history of modern genocide. Certain sections—for instance, those on the
role of the Serbian Orthodox church, the ethnicization of language and toponyms,
ethnic cleansing in the professions (more than 1,000 non-Serbs fi red from various
medical jobs), economy, and administration—are among the best in the literature on
the Bosnian war. Other sections—for instance, the subchapters on mobilization and
forced labor and the new sacral shape of Banja Luka (the destruction of the venerable
Ferhadija mosque was particularly gruesome)—are in many ways unique.
My issue with this book is not with its contents and conclusions. These are on the
whole highly commendable. Rather, it is with what is missing in the interpretative
loom. Galijaš, like many authors who are rightly stunned by the ethnic violence of
the 1990s, tends to overlook the sources of the confl ict in the practice of twentiethcentury
dictatorships, especially of the prewar communist regime. It is not enough
to note the fi ft y-year absence of “political pluralism” following the Axis occupation.
The evidence most apposite to this history is not only the violence and repression
of the royal dictatorship, of the Ustašas, Chetniks, and Partisans, and of the early
communist period, but in the “normal” destruction of tradition in peacetime Titoist
Yugoslavia, the prime targets of which were Muslim cemeteries, mosques, mektebs,
tekkes, pilgrimage sites (dovišta), and various Christian churches, chapels, and monasteries.
When the period of manifest destruction ended in the late 1960s, the righting
of old wrongs provoked new resentments, which was the stock of the Serb backlash
aft er 1974. All of this is missing in Galijaš’s account. Hence, the exaggerated view of
the Left ’s political potential aft er 1990 and the scraps of nostalgia about Yugoslavia’s
prewar golden Lebenswelt.
In fact, just as the infrastructure of confl ict emerged from under Josip Broz Tito’s
šinjel, from the secondary school manuals on the obligatory subject of “all people’s
defense and social self-protection,” so did Ceca and Arkan and many other heroes of
the neue kulturelle Werte, and so did Milorad Dodik, the current boss of Republika
Srpska. These are the true products of the decades of destruction and intellectual
confusion. That untold story, with rather more than six characters, instead of the
misleading tales on socialist consumerism and the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, is in
search of an author.
Ivo Banac
Yale University
Bujrum!
i pise tamo da je 1. korpus Krajine njegova pjesma. Malo se brani kao trebalo mu para.
