Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect

Adis Maksic

Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect

The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War

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Adis Maksic International Burch University Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

To the memory of my father and Džemka

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In October 2004, I stood in a crowd of nearly 35,000 spectators who filled Sarajevo’s Olympic Stadium to watch a World Cup qualifier between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro. The recent political his-tory of the two countries ensured that this would not be an ordinary soc-cer game. For home fans, the event was an opportunity for expressing anger and animosity that stemmed from the involvement of Serbia and Montenegro in the 1992–1995 Bosnian War. Upon hearing the sound of the visiting side’s National Anthem, most of the crowd reacted by whis-tling or turning their backs to the field. Yet, the bits of the tune that fought through a concert of whistles were also creating a moment of irony. The Anthem was Hej sloveni (Hey, Slavs), the same one that the people in the stands would only a dozen years earlier greet with thunderous ovations. Then, it was the Anthem of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a former common state of the two sides that were now facing off on the soccer pitch.

I believe that we can learn much about national self-understandings by pausing to think about a diversity of sensibilities that a performance such as Hej sloveni can mobilize in a single audience. The challenge here is to understand how contextual positioning can alter the meaning of a song, a symbol, or a speech act so that it produces widely different affective expe-riences. For Bosnians of all ethnic backgrounds, Hej sloveni had a recog-nizable tune, having been performed innumerable times in the past. Until the early 1990s, it represented a national self. When played in 2004 as an anthem of Serbia and Montenegro, many associated it with the resented ethnic “other.” The meanings of each performance were also affected

Prologue

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by previous usage. Lurking in the background of the intense anger and animosity that the playing of Hej sloveni triggered in the context of the 2004 soccer game were the more pleasing emotional imprints of the times when the Anthem mobilized no less intense feelings of national pride. This is why many of those same people who whistled and turned their backs to Hej sloveni would approve of it with nostalgia when situated in a performance that memorializes the lost times of the Yugoslav state. This is why an activist of the Bosniak ethno-national SDA party recently told me that he was proud of his involvement in armed mobilization of Muslims in his village near Sarajevo and the role in “bringing down Yugoslavia,” only to add a short time later that he still got “chills” upon hearing Hej sloveni, and lament the destruction of Yugoslavia. Hej sloveni here testifies to the existence of two eras in which Bosnians had two radically different national self-understandings, neither of which was more “real” and natural than the other.

One of the larger arguments of this work is that to understand con-flicts fought in the name of an identity we must dispose of the assumption that collective self-understandings are arranged into a stable hierarchy. Rather, we need to analyze the dynamic sociopolitical processes that produce their evolution across space and time, the processes in which the political elites often have a decisive influence. As I researched these processes, I began recalling the experiences of Bosnia’s turbulent polit-ical developments of the early 1990s that produced the evolution of national self- understandings of myself and my family. I decided to briefly share some of them here for several reasons: to reveal my positionality as a researcher, to illustrate the dynamics of ethno-politicization examined in this study through the actual experiences of one Bosnian family, and to offer a representative example that shows the evolution of identities over time and space.

For the latter purpose, I begin with generational differences. My maternal grandparents hailed from two villages in Eastern Herzegovina, a deeply ethnicized area with an extensive history of intercommunal conflict. Both were Muslims who narrowly escaped the murderous campaigns of Serb Četnik forces during World War II. My grandfather’s father and brother were not so lucky. The Četniks murdered them by throwing them into a deep natural pit. After World War II, my grand-father spent time in prison for being affiliated with Mladi Muslimani (Young Muslims), an underground organization that fought for greater religious rights of Muslims in the communist Yugoslavia. One of his

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prison mates was Alija Izetbegovic , the future Bosnian Muslim leader and president of Bosnia. My paternal grandparents were also devout Muslims from Herzegovina, albeit without the comparable suffering.

If we subscribe to the traditional understandings of ethnicity, my fam-ily would seem as a prime candidate for the perpetuation of ethnic self- understandings across different generations. Both grandparents had a strong sense of ethno-religious belonging, with one grandfather having connections to a dissident Muslim movement. Yet, a seemingly unre-markable event, their move from Herzegovina to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, disrupted this continuity in ways that marginalized old and produced new axes of identification. My parents were born in Sarajevo at a time when Bosnia was undergoing urbanization and industrializa-tion, which resulted in a large influx of people from mono-ethnic villages into the flourishing multi-ethnic cities. It was also a time when the com-munist regime promoted “brotherhood and unity” of Yugoslav peoples while discouraging the main set of practices that differentiated them—the religious expression. In a sharp contrast to the field of socialization of the deeply ethnicized Herzegovinian environment, many of my par-ents’ childhood friends, classmates, teachers, neighbors, and colleagues were non-Muslims. Since there was no language barrier that followed ethnic lines, there was little to prevent these interactions from grow-ing into dense and emotionally felt ties that could define a community to which my mother and father felt a sense of belonging. Such expe-riences, in conjunction with the regime’s policy of “brotherhood and unity”, helped them acquire a strong sense of being a Yugoslav. Despite the wishes of their parents, and in contrast to the deeply felt Yugoslav identity, their awareness of belonging to a Muslim ethno-national cat-egory was only vague and passionless. My father, a former student of the Muslim Madrasa, joined thousands of other Bosnians of all ethnic backgrounds in embracing the ruling ideology and becoming an active member of the communist party.

Being born to the parents with such self-understandings meant that I would be even further distanced from those of my grandparents. Indeed, growing up in Yugoslavia of the 1980s, I did not have any sense of belong-ing to a Muslim ethno-religious category. I was simply a Yugoslav and a Sarajevan. I can say with confidence that most of my primary school class-mates, who I can retrospectively identify as a mix of ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and several others whose ethnic background I am still unable to ascertain, felt the same. I can recall only two traces of ethnic practices that

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connected me to the era of my grandparents. One was a prayer from the Koran that my grandmother taught me and instructed me to recite every night at bedtime. Another was the marking of the Muslim Eid holiday by spending the day at my maternal grandparents’ house. Moreover, I didn’t experience these practices as indicators of ethnic belonging. The Koranic verse was something to be recited for good luck as protection against evil spirits. The Eid celebration was not so much my holiday as that of my grandparents. In contrast, November 29, the Yugoslav Day of the Republic, was one of my favorite times of the year.

It was the process of ethno-politicization in Bosnia analyzed in this study that radically restructured my own conception of collective belong-ing in ways that linked it to those of my grandparents and, hence, to the field of meanings of rural Herzegovina of the early twentieth century. I vaguely recall the dramatic January 1990 exit of the Slovenian delegation from the 14th congress of the Yugoslav League of Communists as the first challenge to my idealistic perception of Yugoslavia as a natural country and an indisputable reality. My father, a committed party member, reacted to the event by lamenting what he perceived to be the Slovenian attempts to secede from Yugoslavia, and praising Serbia’s party leader Slobodan Milošević for what he saw as a resolute struggle to protect the country against separatism. I recall his enthusiastic statement that in hindsight seems surreal: “this Milošević, he is good, he is tough.” The congress marked not only the demise of the party-state regime but also the emer-gence of new political actors and narratives that began to question the interpretations of history and national identity that I theretofore held as simple, undeniable truths. In the following months, I remember hearing more and more about nationalist movements that were gaining mass sup-port in some parts of Yugoslavia. Yet, since a label “nationalist” came with such negative connotations in my microworld that it was akin to an insult; my parents and I perceived the nationalists as little more than an outlier comparable to a marginal underclass, or even a criminal, group.

I recall the first event that genuinely destabilized the perceptions that my parents and I held as the taken-for-granted truths as the moment of emotional disturbance. The event was a friendly soccer game held in the spring of 1990 between Yugoslavia and the Netherlands in Zagreb, the capital of the then-Yugoslav republic of Croatia. We gathered to watch the broadcast, only to hear our Anthem, Hej sloveni, drowned in whis-tles and boos by what was formally the home crowd. We watched in shock as the insults directed at our team continued for the duration of

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the game. In the following days, the event seemed like the only topic of conversations. The reaction was the same by everyone, including my grandparents— outrage at Croat nationalism, which at the time seemed to only reenergize our love for Yugoslavia.

Yet, only more disturbance was on the way. I was spending the summer of 1990 on the Croatian coast with family when the Croatian TV broad-cast the event of the lowering of a Yugoslav flag in Zagreb and the rais-ing of the historic checkerboard flag that the new nationalist Croatian government restored as the republic’s official symbol. I remember my uncle Mirsad’s outrage, accentuated by a hope that the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) would forcibly remove the Croatian nationalists led by Franjo Tuđman. Indeed, whomever we perceived to be the enemy of Yugoslavia was the enemy of ourselves. In the summer of 1990, Tuđman was the vil-lain. When the object of this study, the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SDS BiH), first emerged in July 1990, the event did not leave any memorable emotions precisely because we did not feel it to be a threat to Yugoslavia at the time.

The summer of 1990 also brought to my immediate environment the passions of the campaign for Bosnia’s first multi-party elections, which were held in November. We were suddenly learning about the resurgent Ustaše and Četnici movements, and hearing new narratives that questioned our deeply ingrained binaries of historical heroes and villains. My percep-tions of Ustaše and Četnici had been formed by the regime’s official his-torical narratives that portrayed both movements as the fascist, murderous hordes that the heroic Yugoslav partisans defeated during World War II to restore the rule of the good over evil. I also recall my grandparents’ stories of the Četnik atrocities they experienced in eastern Herzegovina. Yet, the regime’s portrayals seemed to have left a mark, insofar as I never associ-ated Ustaše with Croat nationalists, or Četnici with Serbs. For me, and for many others, both movements simply belonged to the negative side of the Partisan self/Fascist other binary that grounded the dominant narrative of the World War II events in Yugoslavia. They also belonged to the past. While I wondered how Ustaše and Četnici could possibly reappear in the present, the inertia of what I held as a natural order of history assured me that such forces of evil did not stand a chance. Indeed, most people in my surroundings were convinced that either a reformed communist party or the “reformists” of the Federal prime minister Ante Marković would soundly win the elections. My grandparents, however, expressed their intent to vote for the Muslim ethno-national party, SDA. I recall my

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grandfather’s explanation that Muslims needed to unite behind an ethno-national Muslim party because Serbs would vote only for Serbs and Croats would stick with other Croats. When responding to my mother’s disagree-ment, he seemed to be at peace with the differences between a man social-ized in a Herzegovinian village in the 1930s and 1940s and his daughter raised a couple of decades later in the urban bastion of “Brotherhood and Unity”: “you vote for whom you want, I will vote for SDA.”

Despite our expectations, the victory of the three ethno-national par-ties—SDA, SDS, and HDZ—in the November 1990 elections demon-strated that ethnicity was once again a powerful axis around which most Bosnians congregated. More importantly, the victors quickly acted to turn their interpretations of the world into hegemonic understandings, margin-alize all other axes, and ensure that ethnicity would reign supreme. As the Communists and other non-national parties faded from the media spot-light, many of the narratives that had dominated the public discourse for over four decades disappeared. The new regime worked to destigmatize ethnic nationalism, delegitimize “brotherhood and unity,” and overpower a sense of Yugoslav belonging with ethnic solidarity. Political conversations increasingly referenced the wants, needs, and deeds of Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, as if these ethnic nations were somehow natural, undisputed, and well-defined entities. As I heard more of this ethnic “we” and “they,” it seemed to obscure the Yugoslav “we.”

My family’s resilient refusal to identify with any political community other than a Yugoslav one began to unravel with the violent escalation of the political crisis that took place in the summer of 1991. In late June, Slovenia declared independence, a decision that triggered a JNA attempt to seize border posts in Slovenia and, hence, secure the international borders of Yugoslavia. The results of this operation came as the biggest disturbance to our perceptions of Yugoslav reality to date. JNA, our army that, as I was taught to believe, was invincible, suffered a defeat at the hands of the Slovenian territorial defense forces. An even bigger shock was the decision of the federal government to give up on Slovenia and entirely withdraw from the republic. It left us wondering how a Yugoslav army could just let a chunk of Yugoslavia go. For me, it represented a confusing dismemberment of a territorial imaginary that Yugoslav communist meta-narratives, map representations, and the oft-repeated motto “from Triglav to Đevđelija” (the former being a mountain in Slovenia, the latter a town in Macedonia) had turned into an emotionally felt place of the homeland.

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The devastating Croatian War, which followed a brief confrontation in Slovenia, seemed to move people in my microworld from a state of denial to a growing acceptance that Yugoslavia was no longer a country that we knew. As we watched the TV footage of the destruction in Croatia, I recall my mother arguing with my father that JNA was becoming a Serb nation-alist, rather than a Yugoslav, army. My father, a Captain First Class of the JNA reserves, continued to believe that the army was only protecting Yugoslavia against the separatists. Yet, the progression of the war seemed to prove him wrong. In the fall, JNA decided to remove a five-pointed red star as its symbol, which it had carried from its inception. An even bigger shock came with the TV footages from the front line near Vukovar that showed JNA troops fighting alongside soldiers that carried the Kokarda insignia of the Četnici. What we thought to be unthinkable was becoming a reality in front of our eyes. On the one side, there were the Croat and Slovenian separatists. On the other was JNA, which was becoming unrec-ognizable. My father finally became critical of Milošević, while my mother became more forthright—JNA was turning into a Četnik army.

By the fall of 1991, my family seemed to have begun a process of con-stituting new collective self-understandings in place of the old Yugoslav ones, which were crumbling along with the country. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was forcing us to increasingly think about alternative identifi-cations, a process that began to take a toll on personal relations between my parents and their friends and colleagues of Serb ethnic background. In November, SDS organized a plebiscite that asked ethnic Serbs who lived in Bosnia whether they supported the party’s policy of remaining in a shortened Yugoslavia without the Slovenes and Croats. The occa-sion marked a first major political disagreement between my father and one of his best friends, Duško, who was an ethnic Serb. Duško argued that everyone should participate by voting for Bosnia to remain in what was left of Yugoslavia, either on a regular ballot or on a separate ballot that was designated for non-Serbs, while my father believed that such a rump state would not be a “real” Yugoslavia. At about the same time, my mother, a head nurse at a pediatric hospital, was coming home with stories of the divisions at her workplace that followed ethnic lines, with her Serb colleagues congregating and speaking silently, or abruptly ending conversations when non-Serbs approached them. Sometime in late 1991, ethnic differentiations began to penetrate my school life as well. I recall the talk of students having a right to take ethnic holidays as days off, with each choosing a holiday that was her or his own. My parents told me that

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a Muslim holiday, Bajram (also known as Eid), was the one that I may be able to take off. I also discovered that many of my classmates were somehow different from me in this regard, with some marking Christmas rather than Bajram. My best friend Damir was the same, however, as his grandparents also told him that his holiday would be Bajram.

Parallel to the radicalizing ethnic differentiations, the Yugoslav republic in which we lived, Bosnia-Herzegovina, was acquiring new relevance as a source of a political identity. In December 1991, my father brought me a sticker that featured a modified symbol of the Medieval Kingdom of Bosnia, a blue shield with six lily flowers. It was a symbol I hadn’t seen before, but which would in the following weeks frequently show up in newspapers and magazines, and eventually come to represent what i felt to be my new nation. We began hearing more and more about Bosnia’s long-lost history as a state, a discourse that was challenging our entrenched perceptions of Bosnia as little more than a Yugoslav republic in which we lived. With the growing realization that Yugoslavia as we knew it had been lost, the idea that we could reconstitute a sense of national belonging by identifying with the part of Yugoslavia in which we lived was gaining in emotional resonance. By March 1992, it had convinced my parents to attend the Bosnian independence referendum, and vote “yes.” When they cast their votes, they did not see it as a contribution to Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia, or to Muslim ethno-national interests. Quite the oppo-site; they did so to resist the nationalists who dismembered Yugoslavia from absorbing the republic in which they lived. At least, in the latter case, they had little more of a say. Even after the referendum, they still clung on to the hope that some form of Yugoslavia would be restored.

In late March 1992, we began hearing rumors that Serb nationalists had been planning an attack on Sarajevo as a way to decapitate the Bosnian state in its infancy. My father dismissed them, confidently asserting that JNA, or what was left of it, would act to prevent any violence in the c apital: “Maybe there will be problems in some villages in the countryside, but the Army would not allow it in Sarajevo, no way.” However, the events in our immediate surroundings quickly proved him wrong. On April 4, on the eve of Bosnia’s international recognition, we woke up to an armed checkpoint near Vrbanja, a bridge that is located in front of the building in which I lived. I remember walking by the checkpoint that day without disruptions, observing four individuals who wore the red blue and white Serb ethnic insignia on their blue uniforms. I later understood that those were the policemen of the nascent police force of the Serb Republic of

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Bosnia-Herzegovina, a Bosnian Serb statelet unilaterally proclaimed by SDS. The next day, on April 5, I found myself among tens of thousands of ordinary Bosnians who gathered in front of the building of the parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina to demand a peaceful resolution to the crisis. As I was leaving the gathering, I heard gunshots and saw a scene of thousands of people falling to the ground. After making it home, I saw that TV Sarajevo broadcasted the event, and learned that the shots were fired at the crowd by SDS gunmen located in the nearby “Holiday Inn.” The Bosnian police restored order by entering the hotel and capturing the gunmen. However, the worst part of the violence was still to come. A group of protesters branched off to forcibly remove the checkpoint near Vrbanja Bridge, the same one that I walked by a day earlier. I watched from my window as Serb policemen opened fire from the checkpoint, sending into a panicked retreat the unarmed crowd that had begun crossing the bridge. Some of the protesters were pulling back with them several others who had fallen to the ground. We would later learn that two of them, Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić, were dead. They are considered by many today as the first fatalities of the Bosnian War.

The events of April 5 marked the beginning of continuous armed con-frontations in the part of Sarajevo in which I lived. While there was a lot of military activity in my neighborhood, which happened to turn into a front line, we saw and heard very little of the ethnic dimension of the conflict. An armed group loyal to the Bosnian government established a post at one of the corners of our building closest to the Vrbanja Bridge. Some mem-bers of the group wore uniforms, others were in civilian clothes, and all wore the blue shield with lilies of the medieval Bosnian kingdom. Some of them were our neighbors. Their non-Muslim names—Vlatko, Narcis, and Mladen—belie the Muslim ethnic label that SDS was at this time attach-ing to its enemy. On the other side of the bridge was the area patrolled by the loyalists of SDS. Despite their self-identification, I don’t remember a single instance of anyone in my surroundings referring to these formations as Serbs. When people talked about them, they used the term Četnici. It only made sense to differentiate the two, as there were more than a few ethnic Serbs who fought against them. While the month of April 1992 marks the beginning of violence in Sarajevo, the conflict was kept at a relatively low intensity. Damir and I stopped attending school, but we walked freely around my neighborhood, and even spent time with armed groups that were congregating near our building. The sporadic skirmishes and shelling became a daily occurrence, but they would most often begin

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after dark and cease by the morning. In addition to the paramilitaries and the police, the streets were also patrolled by JNA, an armed force that I still felt as my own. The sight of its vehicles, some of which still bore the five-pointed red star, continued to trigger memories of the mighty virtu-ous army born out of the anti-fascist resistance.

These emotional memories would radically change with the traumatic events that took place on May 2. It was early afternoon when several loud explosions shook our building. My parents and I looked through the win-dow only to see a column of JNA tanks on the opposite side of the Vrbanja Bridge whose guns had been turned in our direction. It was the beginning of a five- or six-hour-long firefight that wrecked destruction to our neigh-borhood and marked the beginning of the full-blown siege that would terrorize Sarajevo for three and a half years. We spent the first three hours or so hiding in the basement together with our neighbors, ducking in fear with each of the countless explosions of JNA tank shells that were hitting either our building or the nearby parliament complex. With thunderous vibrations, the smell of dust and gunpowder, and the screams of horrified women, for the first time I feared for my life. It was dusk when several sol-diers, who wore the blue Bosnian shield broke open the back door of our building, loudly told us that the upper floors were on fire, and escorted us to a safer shelter in the neighboring building. Parallel to the events in our vicinity, another battle was taking place near the JNA headquarters in the old part of the town that had been besieged by the loyalists of the Bosnian government. My uncle Mirsad, the same person who in the summer of 1990 pleaded for the JNA to remove the nationalist Croat government, was now part of the besieging force, fighting for an independent Bosnian state. On May 5, we learned that he died during the battle, in the explo-sion of a rocket-propelled grenade fired by the JNA.

My parents and I eventually survived the battle of May 2 physically unscathed, but our emotional dispositions were fundamentally changed. The trauma shattered old and produced new perceptions: of Bosnian sol-diers, who managed to hold off the JNA on May 2, as our army and guardian, and of JNA as a despised foreign force. This rapid restructur-ing of heroes and villains was also helping us reconstitute our national “self.” The confusion caused by the loss of Yugoslavia gave way to a clear, intense Bosnian identity. In the following weeks, our sense of belong-ing to a Muslim ethnic nation also grew amid the news of widespread ethnic cleansing and the killings of Muslims throughout Bosnia. Everyone who could conceivably be perceived as an ethnic Muslim now became

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a potential target of Serb nationalists. As this raised our awareness of Muslim ethnic background, the Koran prayers my grandmother taught me, the holidays I marked, and the beliefs and lifestyles of my grandpar-ents acquired new meaning.

After the events of May 2, the besieging Serb nationalist forces intensi-fied their indiscriminate shelling of Sarajevo. In their interpretation, they were fighting against Muslim fundamentalists who were guilty of attempt-ing to secede Bosnia from Yugoslavia. In September, one of the thou-sands of shells they fired at the city killed Damir, my best friend who only a few months earlier had no awareness of his Muslim ethnic back-ground. His death came four weeks after another tragedy, caused by a shell that exploded meters away from my mother, myself, and several of our acquaintances. It killed a child, a woman, a man, and left my mom permanently handicapped. I was more fortunate, with only a small piece of shrapnel piercing through my leg. I watched as the blood poured through a tear in the fabric, and covered several letters of a large inscription on my sweatpants. It was a word that signified a lost nation and a dying identity—“Jugoslavija.”

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I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who helped me on this journey: to those who encouraged me, who inspired me, who assisted me with research, who read my work and offered comments. First and foremost, I want to thank my mother, Esada, whose steadfast and energetic encouragement was the wind in my sails. I would like to thank my incred-ible advisor Gerard Toal, for guiding me to this road. I was fortunate to have met him and learn so much from him, about politics and about life. I also thank Robert Donia for his priceless comments, encouragement, and for generously sharing his treasured knowledge on the Bosnian conflict. I thank Giselle Datz and Joel Peters whose stimulating classes and com-mentaries have left a large imprint in this work. Special thanks are due to Sead Turčalo for hours of thought- provoking conversations, and for selfless research assistance without which this road would have been considerably more difficult. I thank Sean Henneghan for his generosity during my two-year stay in Washington DC that allowed me to focus my time on academic endeavors. I am also thankful to those many individuals who contributed with research collection, stimulating conversations, words of encourage-ment, and assistance in dealing with distractions. A distinguished mention is due to Edina Bećirević, Natalie Borecki, Mario Bukna, Emira Kasumović, Jordi Martin, Sudbin Musić, Samira Nuhanović, Natalia Peral, and Mirela Vasić.

Acknowledgments

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contents

1 Understanding the Dynamics of Ethno-Politicization 1Beyond Ethnic Identities: From Groups to “Groupness” 6Agents and Meanings: The Discursive Politics of Identity 12Notes 19References 19

2 Ethnic Nationalism as Bodily Pedagogy: Affect, a Regime of Feeling, and Discourse Coalitions 21Defining Affect: Bodies Beyond Discourse 26Synthesizing Discourse with Affect: Toward a Regime of Feeling 29Political Parties as Discourse Coalitions 40Mode of Inquiry: The Threefold Approach 44Data Gathering 49Notes 52References 53

3 Riding the Tide of Nationalism: The Collapse of Yugoslav Party-State and the Emergence of SDS 55New Opportunities and the Emergence of SDS BiH 57Notes 85References 85

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4 Contextualizing Agency: The Discourse of SDS in a Spiral of Polarization 87Concluding Remarks 107Notes 108References 109

5 Networks of Circulation: The Origins and Modalities of SDS BiH 111Organizational Repertoire 113Notes 142References 142

6 Circulation Technologies: Money, Media, and Guns of SDS BiH 145Concluding Remarks 165Note 166References 166

7 Feeling the Nation: The Master Frame of SDS BiH 169Master Frame 171Notes 184References 184

8 Making an Ethnic Group: SDS’s Voter Mobilization Frames in the 1990 Election Campaign 187Cultural Awakening 191Amplifying the Ustaše Threat 195Neutralizing Rival Solidarities 199Note 207References 207

9 Nation on Alert: SDS’s Radical “Othering” and the Priming for Violent Ethno-Separatism 211Concluding Remarks 246References 248

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10 Conclusion: The Making of an Affective Community 253Nation as an Affective Complex 257Categories and Ethno-Nationalism 259Rediscovering the Forgotten Sentiments 260References 262

Index 263

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list of figures

Fig. 3.1 Tens of thousands of people filled Sarajevo’s main Marshal Tito street in May 1990 for a “No-Meeting” organized by SKBiH, which expressed opposition to a division of Bosnia and interference of either Serbia or Croatia in Bosnian affairs 77

Fig. 8.1 Patriarch Pavle of the Serbian Orthodox Church leading one of the reburial ceremonies of remains of Serbs excavated from World War II–era pits 198

Fig. 8.2 Radovan Karadžić, Alija Izetbegović, and Stjepan Kljuić holding a joint press conference 205

Fig. 8.3 Supporters of SDA, HDZ, and SDS holding a joint post-election celebration in Kakanj 205

Fig. 9.1 One of numerous articles in Javnost that deployed the Nazi Swastika in describing the anti-Serb conspiracy by Croatia and Germany. Driving the Nazi locomotive is Milan Kučan, the president of Slovenia, with Franjo Tuđman sitting in the wagon behind 232

Fig. 9.2 A Javnost article juxtaposed the image of the NDH formation in 1941 and the Croatian National Guard parade in Zagreb in 1991 233

Fig. 9.3 Javnost cartoon of an emblem of “NDBiH.” The NDBiH abbreviation associated the potential independent statehood of BiH to the fascist NDH, while the drawing of a mosque suggested that it would be an Islamic state 234

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Table 2.1 Threefold approach 48

list of tAbles