andrew herscherlandscapes painted with fire

7/29/2019 Andrew HerscherLandscapes Painted With Fire

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Landscapes Painted with Fire:

The Spatial Practice of Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia

dr. Andrew Herscher

Harvard University, USA

Ethnic cleansing is typically understood as the forced movement o fethnically-defined groups ofpeople. It is rarely understood to involve the physical, as well as demographic redesign of the

territory it is carried out in. This physical redesign, however, is inextricably linked to the

demographic redesign which ethnic cleansing seeks to institute;"ethnic landscaping" has incited

population movements, insured the permanence of those movements, and attempted to eliminate

evidence of those movements ever having taken place. As such, ethnic landscaping comprises

forms of terrorism, urbanism, and cultural memorialization, allof which are manifested through

the manipulation of the physical environment.The primary, although not exclusive form which

this manipulation has takenis the selective destruction of architecture. Thus, the forcible

deportation of ethnically-defined communities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo during the

conflicts and wars of the 1990s was accompanied by the wide-spread targeting of architecture

associated with those communities:not only the homes of those who were deported but alsoplaces of worship, cultural institutions, and historic monuments. This destruction had both

tactical and symbolic meanings: while it constituted a means of terrorizing a population targeted

for expulsion and discouraging that population from returning to the territory it was expelled

from, it also constituted a means of rendering that expulsion invisible by removing the most

distinctive topographical traces of the population that had been removed. Unlike most previous

cases in which architecture was damaged during war, the ethnic landscaping of villages, towns,

and cities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo was neither a by-product or secondary resultof war, but

the direct objective of activities which were intended to create territories occupied and controlled

by a single ethnic group. Most accounts of the destruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia, Croatia,

and Kosovo have been produced by state ministries of culture, governmental organizations

concerned with historic preservation and have typically related that destruction to a putative

history of inter-ethnic conflict. In this way, these accounts justify precisely the same separation

of ethnic groups into distinct regional or national territories which the destruction of cultural

heritage it self attempted to institute. In fact, the scale of destruction inflicted on architecture in

the Balkans in the 1990s was historically unprecedented; the persistence of the architectural

heritage that was placed under assault in the 1990s testified not to histories of inter ethnic

conflicts,but to a co-existence which was only sporadically interrupted by tensions and conflicts.

The legacies of this co-existence were regions throughoutYugoslavia with ethnically-mixed

populations; while ethnic cleansing sought to undo this mixing demographically, ethnic

landscaping sought toundo its environmental anchors and historical traces, thereby transforming

the potentially evanescent conditions of ethnic cleansing into a perduring historical reality.Whileinternational accords prohibit the deliberate targeting of cultural heritage during warfare, such

accords assume the possibility of clearly distinguishing between cultural and political meanings

and values and thus, of defining cultural artifacts in a neutral, non-political manner. In fact, at

least from the Yugoslav era onwards, cultural artifacts, and especially architecture, have been

designed and constructed in Bosnia,Croatia, and Kosovo according to the most specific of

political programs.The construction of places of worship, the founding of cultural institutions,

and even the listing of buildings as historical monuments were often driven by nationalist

ideologies and agenda; the targeting of places of worship, cultural institutions, and historic

monuments for destruction during nationalist conflicts, then, represents not only their ruption of

an unprecedented violence, but also a persisting overdetermination of culture by political forces.

In Croatia after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, ethnic cleansing occurred throughout theformer Yugoslav republics in almost every region with a sizable Serb minority population, as the

protection of this population was utilized by the Serb government to legitimate Serbia's territorial


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expansion. This procedure first occured during the Serbian invasion of Croatia in 1991. Croatia's

Serbian minority was a legacy of population shifts initiated in the 16th century when the

Habsburg monarchy invited Serbs colonists toareas of its territory bordering the Ottoman empire:

Slavonia, now the easternmost part of Croatia bordering Serbia, and Krajina, now in the

southwest of Croatia bordering Bosnia. Both regions continued to have asizable Serbian

population into the 1990s. With the election of a strongly nationalist government in Croatia in1990 and the implementation of various forms of political and social disenfranchisement,

Croatian Serbs were encouraged by the Serbian government to declare their autonomy from the

Croatian state. After Croatian Serbs voted decisively in a referendum for autonomy in the fall of

1990, a "Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina" was declared. When Croatians voted to

secede from Yugoslavia in the spring of 1991, Serbs in Krajina voted to leave Croatia and join

Serbia. The Croatian government sought to assert its jurisdiction over Krajina by force; with the

resistance of the rebellious Croatian Serbs, a war ensued that drew the Yugoslav National Army

into Krajina and then Slavonia as the putative defender of the rights and claims of Croatian

Serbs.The actions of the army, Serb paramilitary and police, and Croatian Serb irregulars in the

early 1990s resulted in the rapid and violent exodus of much of the indigenous Croat population

of Slavonia and Krajina; more than half a million people were estimated to have fled from thetwo regions inthe first year of hostilities alone. This movement of people was instigated by

laying siege to cities and by terrorizing the Croatian population of towns and villages. Acts of

terrorism were directed against both human beings and property; the latter targets included tens

of thousands of homes occupied by Croats, some of which constituted significant examples of

vernacular architecture, and almost all of the regions' Catholic churches. Religious affiliation was

the key distinguishing feature of Serbs and Croats, the former typically members of the Serbian

Orthodox church, and the latter, of the Roman Catholic church. Targeting a church, then, was a

means of targeting an entire population as an ethno-religious entity. In Krajina, for example, 129

of 161 Catholic churches were destroyed during the war and subsequent Serbian occupation,

while 20 more were substantially damaged. The type of damage sustained by these buildings

evealed that this damage was not collateral but deliberate; most buildings were demolished by

tank mines placed against their end walls, with the mines set off by an explosion from within the

interior, while others were also demolished by dynamiting or shelling.The targeting of Croat

homes and Catholic churches not only forced the departure of the Croat population of Slavonia

and Krajina; it also marked a difference between Croats and Serbs which this architecture in its

extant form blurred. The houses and farms of Krajina's Serb and Croat inhabitants were virtually

identical, as were many of its Orthodox and Catholic churches, at least externally, until the 19th

century. By selectively destroying buildings associated with Croats, this architectural heritage

was made to mark a decisive difference between the two communities rather than their cultural

similarity.By transforming the affiliating element of the population in a given area, ethnic

cleansing also transformed the meaning of that area's architectural patrimony. The presence ofSerbs and Croats in Slavonia and Krajina sinc ethe 16th century implied that both the regions'

cultural heritage was, at least on one level, the common property of all their inhabitants. With the

substantial elimination of Slavonia and Krajina's Croat population and there-settlement of Serbs

from other areas in the regions, the affiliating element of the population was no longer a shared

relationship to a particular place, but membership in a particular ethnic group, with claims to

cultural property then based not on geography but ethnicity.While churches were deliberately

targeted in rural towns and villages,they were less targeted than collaterally damaged in sieges

undertaken by saturation bombardment on cities such as Vukovar and Osijek. In both cases,

architectural monuments were destroyed, though in the latter case complaints about this

destruction could be countered by arguments that the monuments were being used for military

purposes and thus constituted legitimate military targets. Such arguments were used by theYugoslav National Army, for example, to explain the destruction its forces wrought in Vukovar,

whose entire historic city center, largely the legacy of Baroque and Austro-Hungarian building


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campaigns, was devastated in the fall of 1991.During two periods in 1991-1992, the Yugoslav

National Armyalso laid seige to the Old City of Dubrovnik, one of the few places in the district

of Dubrovnik not under the army's control, but one without any military significance. These

attacks were made not in spite of the damage theycould cause to historic architecture, however,

but because of that damage; Dubrovnik's Old City was a renowned and well-preserved historic

environment, and, as such, a major element of the Croatian tourist industry from whose revenuesthe Croatian government was partly supported.While the bombardment of Dubrovnik's Old

Town caused a great deal ofdamage and incited vociferous international protests, the physical

fabricof the town was well-documented, and thus repairable. Far more serious damage was being

done at the same time in rural areas around the city under the Yugoslav Army's control, damage

not due to military operations but to the deliberate vandalism of the army as it burned and

dynamited villages in order to depopulate the region. Given the institutional emphasis on both

regional and international levels to monumental urban architecture over vernacular rural

architecture, these villages were neither documented nor listed as historic sites. As some of the

least-altered cultural environments along the Adriatic coast, however, they possessed a great

historic value. It has been estimated that almost 6,000 buildings were damaged and over 2,000

destroyed in the district of Dubrovnik, including almost 40% of the building stock in occupiedrural areas, with the vast majority of this damage irreperable. When most of Slavonia and

Krajina were re-taken by Croat forces in 1994and 1995, the regions' indigenous and new Serb

population was ethnically cleansed and its Serb heritage became the target of reprisal attacks.

Along with many Orthodox churches damaged in the saturation bombing of Croatian cities

conducted by Serb forces in the early 1990s, others were then deliberately destroyed by Croatian

forces, along with the homes and villages of Croatian Serbs.Both the Serb and Croat assault on

architecture in Slavonia and Krajina involved an effort to re-write the architectural and cultural

histories of those regions; these assaults were, then, themselves often scripted by official cultural

institutions and architectural historians as evidence of a trans historical antagonism between

Serbs and Croats. In a typical account of the damage inflicted on Croatian architecture in the

early 1990s, the "background" to the war in Croatia is the "profound tension" between Croatia,

with its "long historic ties of Western Europe," and Serbia, which has for centuries "looked

eastward." In this context, the Serb attack on Croatian architecture was not a historically specific

occurance but rather the result of "two worlds colliding." Similarly, an account of the damage

sustained by Serbian Orthodox churches in Slavonia and Krajina interprets that damage as "a

continuation of the vandalism that lasted from 1941 to 1945 in the Independent State of Croatia"

whose goal was "the destruction and assimilation of the Serbian people in the north-western

region of Yugoslavia."

Bosnia In the fall of 1991

Serb forces established staging positions within Bosnia-Herzegovina from which they couldmove to Croatia, creating in the process a series of "Serbian autonomous regions" in the Bosnian

Krajina,Hertegovina, and Romanija. As in Croatia, when Bosnia-Hercegovina declared

sovereignity at the end of 1991, Bosnia's Serbs declared their own republic, the Republika

Srpska. With a series of proposal to cantonize Bosnia into separate Serbian, Croatian, and

Muslim regions, Bosnian Serbs,with the support of the Yugoslav National Army--renamed the

Army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herczegovina in 1992--sought to capture as much

of Bosnia as possible, concentrating on two areas of the country with substantial Serbian

populations. Meanwhile Bosnian Croats, supported logistically by the Croatian goverment,

attempted to maximize their territorial holdings, concentrating on western Herczegovina,

adjacent toCroatia proper. In the Bosnian war, both Bosnian Serbs and Croats attempted to stage

the third party in the conflict as, like themselves, defined by an exclusive ethno-religiousdesignation, a definition which would then devalue their claim to represent all Bosnians.

However, this party, laregely but not exclusively Muslim, supported the continuation of the


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historically multiethnic Bosnia, a program that was defeated by the refusal of Bosnian Serbs and

Croats to support it. In most rural areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina, villages were occupied by a

single ethno-religious group, either Muslim, Serb, or Croat. While the populations of towns and

cities was mixed, ethno-religious groups also tended to occupy their own neighborhoods in urban

settings, with a mosque, church, or synagogue often serving as these neighborhood's focal

point.These ethnically-mixed neighborhoods and villages became prime targets in the ethniccleansing of Bosnia. First, with the creation of "Serbian Autonomous Regions" in Bosnian

Krajina and Hercegovina, Bosnian Croat and Muslim villages were burned and their populations

forcibly expelled. In eastern Bosnia, towns and cities inhabited principally by Serbs andMuslims,

the latter becoming another early target of Serb forces. Typically, Serb paramilitary and local

irregulars terrorized a town's Muslim population until they were driven out. If a town organized

forcible resistance, the Yugoslav National Army would subject it to artillery bombardment until

it surrendered. By the fall of 1992, two million people--about half of Bosnia's population--had

been displaced.By the end of the war, it was estimated that more than 2,000 culturally-significant

buildings were damaged and destroyed in Bosnia during the war: 1,115 mosques, 309 Catholic

churches, 36 Serbian Orthodox churches, and about 1,000 other public buildings. The most

significant target was architecture associated with Bosnia's Islamic population. This targeting,however, has more to do with the cultural identity of those who perpetrated it than it does with

the cultural identity of those who were victimized by it. The Serb assault on Bosnia's Muslim

population and its artifacts was driven by the concept of the Serb nation as the defender of

Christianity against the threat of Islam, rather than Islam's actualpolitical role n Bosnia. In this

sense, the ruins of Islamic architecture in Bosnia provided material correlates for Serbian

nationist ideology, rather than or in addition to removing such correlates for its Bosnian

counterpart; Bosnian Islamic architecture, in other words, was less a symbolic anchor of Bosnian

identity than an anchor of Serbian ideology about that identity. Spatial practices associated with

ethnic cleansing have evolved most fully in those parts of Bosnia which have remained under

Serb jurisdiction as the Republika Srpska. In Banja Luka, the largest city in Serb-controlled

Bosnia and the seat of the territory's government, all of the city's 16 mosques were destroyed in

1993, along with its four Catholic churches and two Catholic monasteries. Typically, these

buildings were destroyed not through military operations, but after the city administration was

taken over by the nationalist Bosnian Serb government. The period when these buildings were

destroyed was one in which harrassment of the city's Muslimand Croatian population intensified,

members of both populations were summarily arrested and killed, and males between the ages of

16 and 60 were subject to compulsory labor duty. As a result of these tactics, between 80 to 90%

of Banja Luka's Muslim and Croat population had left the city by 1994, leaving it to a population

comprised of its pre-war Serb minority and Serb immigrants from other parts of Bosnia. By the

cessation of hostilities in Bosnia in 1996, Banja Luka and the Bosnian Krajina which it forms the

center of were substantially devoid of a Muslim population and topographical signs of thatpopulation's inhabitation of the territory. Of some 220,000 Muslims, 14,000 remained, and all

207 mosques in Bosnian Krajina had been destroyed, either burned down or blown up, in most

cases with the resulting ruins cleared away. In the winter of 1996, the municipality of Banja

Luka issued a new urban plan which assigned new uses to the sites of the city's seven most

prominent mosques, all of which had been destroyed in 1993 and their sites bulldozed. The city's

Islamic Community, representing a population 6% ofits pre-war size, fought the implementation

of this plan in the national Human Rights Court; while the court ruled that no new buildings

could beconstructed on the sites of the destroyed mosques and that permits for there construction

of the seven mosques affected by the plan should be issued, no permit was ever given. In the case

of the Ferhadija Mosque, the city's oldest and most promient, the municipality argued that it was

"not a religious facility, but apolitical one dating from the Turkish occupation." Meanwhile, themunicipality initiated the rebuilding of the Serbian Orthodox Church ofthe Holy Trinity, bombed

during World War II by German forces. For Banja Luka's municipality, then, the city's history


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was scripted in order to simultaneously legitimate and repress the disappearance of its Muslim

and Croatian populations, and this script then served as the basis for the city's future

construction, a construction which would remove traces of the removed populations and replace

them with monuments to the population which replaced them. In so doing, the municipality

attempted to insure that the demographic results of ethnic cleansing become permanent. This

attempt has been thus far quite successfull; of the over 100,000 displaced Muslim and Croatcitizens of Banja Luka, only 572 Muslims and 130 Croats had returned as of the summer of

1999. In the few other towns within the Republika Srpska which continue to have a Muslim

population, similar tactics have been employed to prevent the rebuilding of mosques and the

production of conditions which could invite the return of displaced Muslims. In Bijeljina, for

example, approximately 2,700 Muslims of the pre-war population of over 30,000 remain in the

city. In 1993 the city's five mosques were destroyed and their remains cleared away; two of the

sites currently are used for flea markets, two for kiosks and small shops, and one as a parking lot.

In 1998, the national IslamicCommunity of Bosnia-Hercegovina requested permission from the

municipality to rebuild one of the five damaged buildings, the Atik Mosque, in the center of

town, but the municipality denied the request because, accordingto the town's new urban plan, its

site was zoned for a theatre, the construction of which was subsequently prevented by thenational Human Rights Court.In the vast majority of towns in the Republika Srpska, however, no

Muslim populations remain and the destruction of their architectural heritage has remained

unquestioned. Zvornik, for example, lies just over the border between Bosnia and Serbia, and

was one of the first Bosnian towns "cleansed" of Muslims--who comprised 60% of the town's

population--in1991. After the town's five mosques were destroyed, the major of the town's Serb

nationalist government told visiting journalists that the pre-war census figures were inaccurate

and that "there were never any mosques in Zvornik."

Kosovo

The relationship of architecture and politics was different in Kosovo than in Croatia and Bosnia

because of the use of architecture as a proxy for a Serb population to substantiate Serb

sovereignty over the territory. InCroatia and Bosnia, according to nationalist Serb ideology, a

territory's population should have the right to determine their national status; hence the

declaration of Serbian mini-states in Croatia and Bosnia in the early1990s. The population of

Kosovo, however, was by the 1990s over 90% Albanian and it overwhelmingly supported

autonomy from Serbia. In Kosovo,then, the Patriarchate buildings of the Serbian Orthodox

Church, as well as other medieval Orthodox churches and monasteries, have been used to justify

Serb claims to Kosovo, with actual and putative damage to those buildings offering pretexts to

tighten those claims.When the Kingdom of Serbia wrested control of Kosovo from the Ottoman

Empire in 1912, they set out three justifications for Serbian rule in the province: the "moral right

of a more civilized people," the ethnographic right of a people who "originally" constitutedKosovo's majority population, and the Serbs' historic right to the place which contained

thePatriarchate buildings of the Serbian Orthodox Church. While these buildings directly

substantiated the third of these justifications, they also were scripted as evidence for the

preceding two claims; the medieval architecture of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo

testified both tothe Serb's civilizational level and to their past presence in the province. Between

the world wars, this patrimony of medieval architecture was supplemented by an extensive

church-building campaign in Kosovo; this campaign led both to the reconstruction of ruined

Serbian Orthodox churches and the construction of new ones. Significantly, it is often difficult to

distinguish between the two procedures, as what was termed a"reconstructed" (obnovljena)

church was sometimes located on a site where a medieval chronicle or charter attested that a

church once existed, even if no elements of the original building remained. This equivocationbetween reconstruction and construction reflected the manner in which Serbian Orthodox

architecture in Kosovo was endowed with a continuous existence on an ideological level as a


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marker of Serb presence in theprovince, whether or not this architecture actually existed on a

material level. To reinforce the same historical continuity, churches built in this period, in both

Kosovo and Serbia, utilized a historicist architectural vocabulary drawn from medieval Serbian

Orthodox churches.Indeed, as prominent historic churches in Kosovo, such as the Church ofthe

Dormition of the Virgin at Graanica Monastery, were often used as direct models for

contemporary churches elsewhere in Serbia, the merging of the historicist with the historicmirrored the intended merging of Kosovo with Serbia proper.While the construction of religious

buildings in Yugoslavia was restricted from the establishment of Tito's Communist government

in 1945 until the relaxation of church-state relations in the mid-1970s, the Institute fo rthe

Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo, founded in 1952, institutionalized the production

of cultural heritage in Kosovo and provided another field on which an ideology of culture would

play itself out. By the time of last year's war, some 210 Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries,

and grave sites were listed as protected historic monuments in Kosovo, including over 40

churches built between the 1930s and the1990s . In contrast, only 15 of the more than 600

mosques in Kosovo werelisted as historic monuments, even though well over half of these

mosquesdate from the Ottoman era (14th-19th c.). New Serbian Orthodox churches constructed

in the 1990s were prominently positioned in the centers of cities such as Prishtina and Djakovica,while dozens of smaller churches were also constructed in provincial towns and villages, many

withthe patronage of prominent members and supporters of the Milosevici regime. At the same

time, Albanian resistance to Serbian control of Kosovo was sometimes expressed through the

vandalism of precisely those artifacts by which that control was legitimated: historic and

contemporary Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries. This vandalism was heavily

publicized in the state-controlled media as part of a campaign charging Kosovo'sAlbanians with

"genocide" against Kosovo's Serbs and their cultural heritage. Monument protection was seized

upon by the Serbian governmentas one of the pretexts for its decision to impose direct rule on

Kosovo, aprovince that had in Tito's era received considerable control over its own internal

affairs; if architecture legitimated Serbia's claim to Kosovo, then damage to that architecture

became damage to that claim.The revocation of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, the declaration of a

state of emergency in the province, the forced removal of ethnic Albanians from all public

institutions, and a series of human rights abuses perpetuated by Serb security forces in the

province led to escalating tensions between the province's ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb

government. Increasing repression and the evident failure of non-violent resistance to bring

about change led to the formation of an armed insurgency, the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the

outbreak of open conflict between the KLA and Serbian government forces in 1998. Serb forces

initiated a counter insurgency campaign in March 1998, directed against the KLA and Kosovo's

ethnic Albanian population. In this campaign, as large numbers of Kosovo's Albanian population

were forcibly deported from their homes, the historic architecture associated with that population

was systematically targeted for destruction. This targeting took place bothas groups of peoplewere being expelled from their places of residence, apparently to diminish these people's

incentive to return to their hometowns and villages, but also after expulsions took place,

apparently to remove visible evidence of Kosovo's deported Albanian community.The primary

buildings singled out by Serb forces for destruction in 1998and 1999 were mosques; at least 207

of the approximately 609 mosques in Kosovo sustained damage or were destroyed in that period.

Other architectural targets of Serb forces were Islamic religious schools and libraries, more than

500 kullas (traditional stone mansions, often associated with prominent Albanian families), and

historic bazaars. Three out of four well-preserved Ottoman-era urban cores in Kosovo cities were

also severely damaged, in each case with great loss of historic architecture.The damage sustained

by these buildings was not collateral. Damaged and destroyed monuments were often situated in

un disturbed or lightly-damaged contexts, and the types of damage which monuments received(buildings burned from the interior, minarets of mosques toppled with explosives, anti-Islamic

and anti-Albanian vandalism) indicate that this damage was deliberate, rather than the result of


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monuments being caught in thecross-fire of military operations. In a number of cases, eyewitness

eshave also been able to precisely describe attacks on historic monuments.While the United

Nations High Commission on Refugees has estimated that 70,000 homes were destroyed in

Kosovo from March to June, 1999, the destruction of historic architecture has a unique

significance in that itsignifies the attempt to target not just the homes and properties of individual

members of Kosovo's Albanian population, but that entire population as a culturally-definedentity. As in Bosnia, the targeting of Islamic architecture in Kosovo was driven more by Serb

ideology of the Islamic Other than by Islam's political and cultural role for Kosovar Albanians,

for whom Islam did not contribute significantly to national identity.International accords prohibit

the targeting of cultural artifacts during warfare. This legal protection implies that war is not

waged over questions of culture and thus, that cultural artifacts can unproblematically be

distinguished from legitimate military targets. The ethnic conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and

Kosovo, however, wer sanctioned by recourse to little else than culture. Competing versions of a

nation's cultural identity were staged as the bases for competing claims for sovereignty over that

nation and cultural artifacts, such as architecture, were presented as precise evidence for those

claims. The entanglement of the cultural and the political which led to the wide-scale destruction

ofhistoric architecture in the former Yugoslavia, then, was less anavoidable anomaly of thoseconflicts then one of their constituent elements.

andrew herscherlandscapes painted with fire

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