The Destruction of Libraries in Sarajevo
Book Burning as "Culturecide" in the Bosnian War
Jul 14, 2009
Book burning is something that we usually think of as belonging to an ignorant past. The Inquisition might come to mind, where books were destroyed to prevent the spread of heresy, to keep the flock from questioning the shepherds, and maintain the power of the Church. Or maybe something a little more recent might occur: the pile of burning tomes in Nazi Germany, where any books containing ideas thought to be dangerous to German nationalism were immolated in front of cheering crowds. Sadly, burning books is not something that we only read of in the history books nowadays.
Culturecide
British journalist Robert Fisk, reporting from war-torn Bosnia in the early 1990s, coined the term "culturecide" to refer to the deliberate destruction of art, archaeological artifacts and historic buildings that he saw happening around him (Independent (London), June 20, 1994). Destroying such tangible cultural artifacts strikes at the heart of the people who cherish them. Kemal Bakarsic, chief librarian of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war, said, "I think the aim of this kind of aggression, against museums, against libraries, is to erase our remembrance of who we are" ("The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives," available online at OpenBook Quarterly).
The Bosnian war erupted after the former Yugoslavia ousted communist rule in the 1990s. Factions within Bosnia and Herzegovina were unable to agree upon whether to remain with the Yugoslav federation or declare independence. Serbian nationalists, strongly in favor of remaining with Yugoslavia, reacted with attempts at ethnic cleansing when Bosnia and Herzegovina opted for independence. (For more on the conflict and its ethnic cleansing, see "Bosnia and Herzegovina" on Wikipedia and The Bridge Betrayed by Michael A. Sells, University of California Press, 1996.)
Book Burning
In late August, 1992, Serbian forces began a careful attack on the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Library had been established in 1945 from several much older collections and contained somewhere in the area of a million and a half books which represented, according to book historian Nicholas Basbanes, "a common heritage that Muslims, Serbians, and Croatians had shared for more than four hundred years" (A Splendor of Letters, page 134). It was not only an attack on non-Serbian ethnic culture, it was an attempt to destroy any record of multiple ethnicities living in harmony.
The bombardment of the National Library was not an isolated book-burning incident in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. A few months before the Library was bombed, Serbian nationalists had targeted the Oriental Institute, also in Sarajevo, destroying thousands of Jewish and Islamic manuscripts in a variety of languages, along with thousands of documents. Other libraries were also attacked, including the Library of the Museum of Herzegovina and the Archives of Herzegovina as well as the library of the Roman Catholic Archbishopric in Mostar (Bakarsic; Basbanes, page 136).
Book Heroes
The attempt to wipe out the history and memory of ethnic groups through the destruction of libraries may not be as horrific as the atrocities committed on living human beings during wartime, but it can have longer-lasting effects. And even while their own lives are threatened, there are people who recognize the value of libraries and will risk their own lives to save what books they can. 100,000 books were saved by ordinary people dodging sniper bullets, bombs and collapsing rubble during the attack on the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Basbanes, page 134). Their actions make each one of them a hero.
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