‘Sarajevo Is Not What It Used to Be’: Ex-Sarajevan Serbs and Their Ambivalent Relationship to Their Place of Origin

Abstract

This article investigates the striking ambivalence of people who left reintegrated Sarajevo en masse after the Bosnian war and have still retained a connection to the city. While ex-Sarajevans identifying as Serbs have cultivated a strong emotional relationship to their place of origin and have maintained various temporal, material, and political linkages with the city, they have completely ruled out the idea of returning physically. By addressing their ambivalent relationship with their place of origin, this study posits that ex-Sarajevans do not embrace the idea of returning to a ‘point fixed in space’, but rather harbour a utopian dream of returning to a ‘point fixed in time’. Rather, it argues that instead of mourning the place itself, ex-Sarajevans truly miss the previous forms of sociability, which no longer exist in the post-war milieu.

‘Exodus’: The Serb flight from Sarajevo, its legacy, and its role in the political memory of Republika Srpska

“…This ‘externalisation of guilt’ (Wylegała, 2015), blaming enemy actors and the manipulation of individuals are coping mechanisms found in other cases of involuntary mass migrations during the 20th century, namely, the Greco‐Turkish war of 1921–1922 (Clark, 2006; Iğsız, 2018), the disputes on the Italian‐Yugoslavian Borderlands (Ballinger, 2003), the partition of India in 1948 (Zamindar, 2010) and the division of Cyprus in 1974 (Bryant, 2012; Loizos, 2008). Similar discursive frameworks have been established by leaderships in Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo regarding the aftermath of involuntary migrations during the 1990s (Žíla, 2022b). Scholarship on societies affected by forced migration and displacement shows how an ethno‐nationally defined political elite typically creates and controls the official memory discourse established surrounding the enforced transfer of populations.…”

“…It channelled the post‐war hardships confronting former Sarajevans as a mechanism to help realise the desired spatio‐political arrangement. The RS elite has hidden the outcome of losing Sarajevo and suppressed the fact that many displaced Sarajevans could not come to terms with their loss (Pupovac, 2020; Žíla, 2022b). Promoting the notion of Serbhood as an imagination, the RS leaders have ignored crucial contexts related to Sarajevo's unification, only interjecting and paying attention to contents and commemorative practices that fit their own (Kienzler & Sula‐Raxhimi, 2019).…”

“…While the political memory of RS focuses on the material meaning of what people lost, it omits a reflection on people's feelings associated with nostalgia and loss. Sarajevan Serbs did not leave behind only their material possessions but also their former lives, their urban and cosmopolitan identity and the city, which for them ‘is no longer what it used to be’ (Žíla, 2022b, p. 416).…”

“…During commemorations, it has been echoed that 'in total, 120,000 Serbs from Serb Sarajevo struggled through snowdrifts toward RS' (Face TV, 2021;RTRS, 2016cRTRS, , 2018c. These numbers are inflated; it seems realistic to estimate that between 60,000 to 100,000 Sarajevan Serbs left their homes after the end of the war (Sell, 1999;Žíla, 2022b). The political memory of RS refers to the people who left Sarajevo as 'refugees' (izbjeglice), even though many of them settled in RS and thus were technically internally displaced persons (Pupovac, 2020).…”

“…In the third dimension, the legacy of escape is understood as dealing with a rupture. The departure of Sarajevans and their uprooting meant the final withdrawal from their place of origin (Correia, 2018; Pupovac, 2020; Žíla, 2022b). This dimension underlines the importance of Sarajevo to Serbs and the importance of Serbs to Sarajevo.…”